A reason to like St. Patrick's Day again!

Twenty-five years ago this St. Patrick’s Day, while jogging on the Syracuse University campus, I got hit by a car.

It was all my journalism professor’s fault. Because his first assignment to us, the semester previous, was to write our own obituary. I thought it was an immensely stupid assignment, so I wrote something that required as little thought and seemed as plausible as any other cause of death: that I met my demise at the hand of a reckless driver while I was jogging.

“Be careful what you ask for” didn’t occur to me at the time. Hell, I was nineteen and immortal. I just wanted to get the stupid thing done. It was dumb enough that the requirement for the course was to type 35 words per minute on a manual typewriter without having to do a lame exercise like this. I was a journalist! I wanted to go outside and interview someone! Not sit “home” in my ugly airless dorm room speculating on the manner of my death.

I wasn’t thinking about this at all that chilly St. Patty’s morn. I had a break between classes. A light snow was falling, I pulled on my sweats, laced up my brand-new Nike trainers, gray with blue accents, grabbed my keys and ID card and head out the door. And it was a lovely jog – down the street to the Sadler and Lawrinson dorms, around the curve of the Carrier Dome (the concrete barely dry back then), up the hill and on toward Comstock Avenue, the long, fairly flat road that heads out to Manley Field House. My usual route was a three miles – one and a half out, one and a half back. The halfway point was a loop around the cemetery opposite the field house, then home.

I’d almost made it back. I turned from Comstock onto Euclid (where now there sits a guard house, so no rapists or car bombs or similar will make it onto campus proper, at least by car) and started the curve around the retaining wall below The Mount. From there I’d go around the Women’s Gym and back down the hill. The sidewalk was icy, so I stuck as close as I could to the edge of the road.

Going around the curve, I met the car coming the other way. It was a big car, a big old shark of a car like something from the early 60s. Coming too fast. Then it went into a skid. The next thing I knew my knee smashed through the headlight, I did a probably very ungraceful forward-roll over the opposite fender and ended up flat on my back on the ground.

Several people were standing around me. Including the driver. He looked terrified.

He kept offering to take me to the hospital. Then, when the situation seemed in hand, everyone else scattered, and he offered me other things. Tickets to the basketball game. Any seat I wanted. He could do it; he was the team’s equipment manager.

I could smell the alcohol on his breath. At least that’s how I remembered it. I also remembered at some point he was mad at me for taking out his headlight with my kneecap. I think that was before he realized the potential trouble he was in.

I wanted nothing to do with him. No way was I getting in his car. I wanted an ambulance, which came and loaded me aboard.

All that was found, after the ER doctors had cut away my sweatpants and gave me a tetanus shot, was a sprain to the knee that had made contact. Something on the car had torn the nylon upper of one of my running shoes, which pissed me off because I’d barely broken them in, but I was lucky. If I hadn’t been all warmed up from my jog, if I’d been farther out into the road, the injuries might have been worse.

I got a brace, which all my roommates signed, and had to use crutches (picture that on a hilly campus in still-icy March in Syracuse before the ADA laws.). Turned out to be a good way to meet guys. At least once a day, someone offered to carry my backpack and walk me to wherever I was going.

But still, I could have done without the injury.

This year, however, I have reason to like the holiday again. My nephew, along with his school’s marching band, will be participating in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan. So anyone with a TV within broadcasting range – check out the Kingston High School Marching Band. They’re pretty cool.

So is having a good memory to wipe away the bad ones.

Go Kingston! I hope to God it doesn’t snow.