A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the—

(or, What Doesn't Kill You Makes Your Limp Stronger)

Technically, my birthday had already been over for a few hours when I stepped into the busy street without looking and got hit by the cargo van. Still, during the brief time between when it smacked into me and when I smacked into the ground—that is, during the brief time that I was airborne—I remember thinking that there is a certain poetry to getting run over on your birthday. "Thirty-five," I mused, "That's a sufficient number of years..." (I also remember thinking things that were less poetic, like, "I hope this doesn't break my iPod.")

None of this is historically unprecedented: when my father was a boy, he became famous in his home town by stepping out in front of a dump truck. He also flew through the air, and wound up spending a significant part of his childhood in and out of casts and leg braces. He made it into all the local papers (and in a way, that is how my parents first met...).

No such celebrity for me. Though the sound of the van hitting my body seemed significant at the time (like the sound of crushing a six-foot soda can, like the sound of metal burping), and though I found myself a bit farther down the block than where I'd stepped off the curb, I somehow managed to get away without a scratch. (Well, one scratch.) I expected the driver to be furious—he had every right to be, since I'd walked out in front of him. So when I hit the ground, my first impulse was to apologize. "Sorry to get all up in your grill"...

How many near-death experiences does it take to add up to a whole-death experience? Because, for a youngish middle-class white guy, I wonder if I've had maybe more than my fair share... (Then again, there's something not quite right about the term "near death"—it's a linguistic fallacy along the lines of "near-pregnant": you are or you aren't, and proximity doesn't have much to do with it...)

The fact is, when I was half this age, I was sure I wouldn't live to be this age. And when the end comes, it probably comes with all the advance warning of a speeding cargo van crashing into the left side of your body. Thirty-five is a sufficient number of years. But I'll take more. And today, I'm glad to have them...