On the road between the high school and my house is a mildly curvy road
that was lined with houses with driveways that emptied right onto it.
The combination of fast traffic and limited visibility for driveways
had been the cause of one of my friend's mom death when she was
struck by a police truck as she backed out of her driveway. Just a
few blocks from the scene of that tragedy I had my own incident which
was nothing on the scale of having your mom die but a decent
day-wrecker nonetheless. It was a nice fall afternoon and I had been
late at school at wrestling practice. I was driving a little over the
speed limit but no dramatically so when I rounded a soft corner and
saw a group of about 20 kids playing on a lawn so I slowed down a
little. I was watching the kids and didn't notice that their dog, a
good sized golden retriever had run into the road. I hit him hard and
stopped, absolutely sick to my stomach. I backed up the car a little
and I saw the dog moving and thought for one moment that maybe it
wasn't that bad and the dog would be okay. Hope springs eternal. When
I got out I saw right away that this was not going to go well. The
dog was broken in half and was painfully dragging its back legs and
yelping. I almost puked with the shock and horror of it and the kids
all came running over to see if the dog was okay. I started to
blubber about how I was sorry and that he just ran out and I couldn't
stop and I wished I could just get in my car and drive away but I
thought protocol indicated I should stay and help where I could. When
the kids saw how badly hurt the dog was they started to cry and try
and hold the dog who was whimpering and yelping in quite a bit of
pain. Some of the older kids started yelling at me and telling me
they hated me and a couple grabbed handfuls of gravel and threw them
at me. It was okay I hated myself too. A grandfatherly looking guy
ran over and saw how bad the dog was and that I was a little shell
shocked. He realized as I had that the dog was not going to get
better and that the best thing was to put it out of its misery. He
asked me if I could take the dog away and put it down I told him that
I would and we carefully pulled the dog away from the distraught
children and laid him in my trunk on a blanket that I had in there
and I drove away as some kids ran towards the car crying and other
went back to the lawn still sobbing. I never found out what kind of
gathering the group of kids and their parents were having but I think
it is safe to say it was not the best-whatever-it-was they had ever
had.
