Sometime in the early '80s, Mirelle and I were traveling through St. Clair Shores, heading in the direction of Detroit. She was a bit too old to need a car seat, but I had her in one anyway, as both of us had suffered a family tragedy involving an automobile--an
accident still fresh in my mind.
Since she was sitting up high, Mirelle could see as far as I could down the road, where, near an intersection, a poodle-ish dog was wandering around, unattended. Traffic was fairly heavy, and we were alarmed. I told her that I would try to get to the intersection with the idea of coaxing the dog to jump in the car and out of the danger zone. As you can guess, we didn't get there. A car hit the dog, and another, and another, and another. Watching that animal being bounced around was horrifying, and Mirelle was screaming. This was something I didn't wish for her to see, and I was shaken by the incident as well.
While living in Texas and in my last full year there (1980), I hit an armadillo with the car. Awful. I felt like crap and it was bizarre, too; it was at night and the poor animal seemed to be illuminated in the headlights. Felt like I had run into a dinosaur.
Something much nicer: Let's switch gears and move forward 15 years, when the Detroit Red Wings were the Stanley Cup champions in 1997, for the first time since 1955. I had been living in Olympia, Washington for 14 years, still lovingly connected to my family back in Michigan. So connected to them through phone calls and the mail, in fact, that my father had sent me a photo of Red Wings' captain Steve Yzerman in a boat three times (usually in a package of newspaper articles my mother had mailed), where his last two notes said, "Have I already sent you this?." Let's just say that everyone with Detroit loyalties celebrated like mad when the Wings took it all.
Not long after that, I received a Red Wings flag to put on my car, and I was pulled over by a cop when I failed to make a left turn into the closest lane. Luckily for me, it was a warning and not a ticket from the man in blue. But he must not have known anything about hockey. He asked me, "What is that flag on your car? Are you delivering pizza or something?"