Close Calls

So I'm sitting here. Doing nothing. Waiting for the worst to happen. Actually, I'm lying on my back on my bed. Most comfortable position for me when I'm lying down. Though it's not easy getting up from the bed when I'm on my back. Sitting up from that position, I mean, and then standing up beside the bed. Anyway, I don't want to read anything. I don't want to listen to anything. I just want to continue lying on my back and think about what happened to me today. About a half hour ago. What could have been the worst thing that ever happened to me. I surely thought I was lost. That's why I went to my bed so soon after I got home and cleaned myself and changed my undershorts and sweatpants. To think about what happened to me before. And also, no doubt, to calm myself down after the experience. I had just mailed a couple of packages at the post office near my house. I've been giving away a lot of things lately and these were two of them: an ice bucket that was given to my wife and me for our wedding 33 years ago. To my niece in Connecticut, who entertains a lot and I thought would like having a silver ice bucket from Tiffany's. It's badly tarnished—hasn't been cleaned for years—but that would be easy to remedy with silver polish. I even thought of buying some silver polish and putting it in the package with the bucket. But then I thought she might take some sort of offense at that—I don't know what. And she might also think when she opens the package: Doesn't he think I have an ice bucket, though I doubt she has one as good as this one and from Tiffany's, and that she probably has silver polish at home? The other package was to my sister in California: a set of six VCR tapes of Sid Caesar television shows of the Fifties. My wife had ordered them online about 10 years ago. Or maybe she got the phone number of the company that sold them and ordered them that way. She would, about once a month, when she felt she needed a good laugh, as she said, watch one or two of the tapes, and usually I'd join her, mostly to keep her company. When I told my sister I had these tapes and was going to give them to Purple Heart or MS Society or some organization like that when they called to say their truck was going to be in my neighborhood and did I have anything for them to pick up?—somehow this came up in our phone conversation—she said she was a big Sid Caesar fan and she also still had a working VCR player and would love to have the tapes. But about what happened to me less than an hour ago. I was in my car. Had made a right turn out of the post office parking lot and was waiting for the traffic light at the corner to turn green. One car was in front of mine. The light changed. I was set to move soon as the car in front did. When a car on the road perpendicular to mine sped through a red light—this, just after the car in front of me started moving—made a sharp screeching left toward the road I was on, was past the car in front, which had stopped moving, seemed out of control—the speeding car did—shot up a short steep embankment on its right, so to my left, came down—heading straight for the car door I was sitting behind, and at the last second cut right and passed me in the direction of the post office but got so close that it scraped in one continuous line the left side of my car from the front door to the rear fender. I'm not picturing it right. All those lefts and...