Blood from a Stone

By James Dufresne

All forms of the expression I have read
make mention of not getting life from something dead,

Not being able to tax or borrow from emptied accounts,
or are flowery words from a heart that's been pained.

But to have the thing happen as forces of gravity and physics collide
and a stone 'neath the stone picked up, with fingers twixt the divide

Provides a moment of expletives, rue, and hurt in goodly amounts
as upon the wanted boulder, the sanguine fluid drained.

You can get blood from a stone.

Have you ever had a moment where you thought you were about to die?

I've had four.

Two involved driving in snow. In one, my car skidded toward the side of a steep hill on a busy road on my way home from classes at UConn and stuck in a drift of snow just a couple of feet off the pavement. Oncoming traffic was such that anyone behind me couldn't avoid either hitting me or crashing head-to-head into them. My car was a 1988 Ford Taurus with All-Wheel-Drive that I'd bought from a man who lived across the lake and was an elder in the church I went to through my childhood. He would sometimes give me and my brothers rides home in the car, one memorable one being when I had an orthodontist appointment after school. He was an emeritus professor in brain research, the hippocampus to be exact, and when he asked if I intended to play football on the high school team and I replied no, he let out a quick, "Good!" well before concussions and traumatic brain injuries were a topic of discussion anywhere. But here I sat in the self-same car with an 18-wheeler barreling downhill in the rearview mirror, promising to deliver a harder tackle than any defenseman could dish out. I truthfully don't remember how the car got unstuck --- whether I backed it out quickly, punched on the gas, or if divine Providence stepped in. It truly was a blur. In the other accident, I was a young driver in a cream-colored Ford Escort station wagon, stupidly trying to return some library books in the middle of a 3" storm, hit a patch of ice at the start of a downhill where wind-squalls had covered the road over, started skidding, *very* nearly smacked side-to-side with a red sedan climbing uphill, and ended up kissing the guardrail at the bottom of the V-dip in the road before coming to a stop, surveying the damage to the fender and sheepishly driving home.

Another involved a minor medical issue that suddenly became a pretty big problem. I've gotten spring allergies pretty bad starting in 2005. Never had them prior to that. I have my own botanical theories about it, but this is neither the time nor the place.... I had fallen asleep in our rocking chair and woke up suddenly, out of breath and unable to move. My thinking mind's toggle switch had flipped but the corporeal one was still being paralyzed by the pons of sleep, and my nasal passages felt swollen. I was aware that I hadn't breathed and was running out of air and could pass out or simply suffocate if my body didn't wake up. And then maybe 10 seconds later, it did, I breathed slowly and purposely through my nose, and the my mouth came on line and joined in the nitrogen/oxygen/etc. feast and I really felt glad to be alive at that moment. It's a feeling I've tried to hold on to during tough times.  I have no hesitation in taking an OTC anti-allergy medication ever since, when needed and when pollen counts are elevated because of all the tree sex.

Lastly, there were a few minutes on 10 May 2011 when I thought there was a good chance I was going to either get seriously maimed or killed in a dog attack involving what I've come to understand was a Cane Corso and a boxer. I haven't written about this before because I reached a settlement just last May (nothing earth-shattering). I was walking my dog, Ruff, on a dirt/gravel back road when the two aforementioned dogs ran across the road and started in on us, pinning us down against an embankment and going for Ruff's throat and chest as I tried to alternately push them off of us. This strategy wasn't working very well, against the main instigator who was easily 100 pounds and tenacious (in the bite report, it was listed as a "Rome X" = Cane Corso = dogs that were used in the ancient Colosseum against the gladiators. I had never planned or prepared to be a gladiator. Who knew?!!?). I yelled out for help. I had my hands up, trying to keep this dog, especially, from imminently crushing my dog's throat. I felt the bite into my finger. It felt like it went on for 10 minutes, but it was probably closer to five. The homeowner came out and had to lay on the Cane Corso as Ruff and I limped away and I started assessing the damage. A 3-inch flap of Ruff's chest was hanging down and this upset me even more than my own injury. We called the local animal control officer, hopped in the car, and drove to the vet, where Dr. Gardner took in the situation and exclaimed that it really said something to her that here I was holding a bloody gauze to my elevated left hand, but the vet was our first stop. Damn straight! Ruff got five stitches, I actually got none despite the depth because, as the ER doctor said, stitches trap in bacteria in dog bites. Followed up a few times with a specialist to make sure there was no more severe damage. I later learned that our brush with the business end of this dog was the fourth --- and most severe --- incident of aggression and that as I had urged in my statement to the ACO, the homeowner had it put down. I can't say that I'm happy about that because I know what it is to lose a dog you're attached to. But it's a relief that no one else in the neighborhood, most not my little niece, will ever be at risk from it. Once a dog bites, it gets easier for them to bite again and this was a breed that epitomizes the latter part of the phrase, "All dogs can bite. Some dogs don't let go." What truly saddens me is that incidents like this are almost totally avoidable, and with this dog's pattern of incidents it was entirely predictable for some poor schmoe who was walking down that road at wrong moment.

And so, there they are. The four times I thought there was a good chance I was going to die. Perhaps this chance in each case was overblown in my mind. Perhaps not. The fear was real. Each event, however, gave me a little taste of mortality, left me grateful for a new day, and imbued a touch of rare grace. I'm not sure how long this kind of afterglow lasts and I surely do not desire refreshers, but all most of the aphorisms about escaping from the reaping scythe and finding renewal on the other side, even if only briefly, are true.