Gravel Roads & Football

Back in the beginning of August while I was at scout camp Alex started double days, AKA "Hell Week". It is so named because they begin very intensive football practice twice a day. Actually, Alex claims that the practices are so long that it isn't really two practices but they run together and it is just one very long practice. I believe it was his first day of double days that Alex made a good solid tackle when someone took his feet out from beneath him. Alex came down hard on his shoulder tearing his acromioclavicular joint more commonly called the AC joint. Apparently his AC joint looked very much like the one shown above. X-rays confirmed that his joint was 50% torn. Any more and it would have meant surgery. He was told that he would be out for at least 6 weeks and that was quite devastating this being his senior year and all. After an afternoon of self pity Alex decided to give it his all and this week only four weeks later he was given the go ahead to begin practicing again. His physiotherapy has dropped from three days a week to two. His shoulder now has this funny little bump on it that I guess he will have for the rest of his life but it works and that is what counts. I guess there is a good chance that once he is my age it will probably start bugging him again but when you're only 17, 50 seems a long way off. Today was the beginning of football season. It seems so odd to me that I'm actually looking forward to it. Anyone who knows me is probably just as amazed. I've never been into sports of any kind and the very first football game I ever watched was when Ben started playing football in his freshman year. I've watched quite a few since then and I'm just now actually beginning to understand the little intricacies of the game. I'm a long way from being an expert of any sort but I do know what is going on now. Alex actually played most of the game and what a great game he had. I took my video camera but wouldn't you know it, his best play of the game and I was distracted and missed it. I'm getting no end of grief about that too but I did get a lot of other good plays. The best was when he recovered a fumble on the 21 yard line with 3 minutes left in the game. He set his team up for a field goal that took them ahead to win the game.

He made many kids on his team quite upset because they figured they had his spot but I think he proved himself. We won 27 to 24. Nine more games to go.

---------------------------------------

I've discussed many things about Rosemary that I love and miss but there are a couple things that I don't miss. Cold was one but the other would be gravel roads. The town had gravel roads (except for the main street) and when it rained or snowed it was pretty gross. The main highways were paved but all of the other roads were gravel and everything was covered with dust. The farmers would often oil the stretch of road in front of their houses but it didn't make a whole lot of difference. There was a short cut from Rosemary to Highway 1 that we used to take to cut a few minutes off the trip. In the map above it is the road marked with the "X". Of course, it is a gravel road. Because of the scarcity of supplies and services in Rosemary you can imagine we made the trip to Brooks quite frequently. Up to this point in our marriage Lisa and I had never owned a new car. I finally decided that I had worked long enough that it was time to buy a new car. Because of our location in Rosemary and my daily trips into Bassano I also decided to buy a car that got good gas mileage. I then became the proud owner of a brand new Geo Metro. That baby got 50 miles to the gallon. It was supposed to be my car but Lisa ended driving it most of the time. One day Lisa was taking Kira into her dance class and I was home with the other kids. I then received a phone call from some stranger telling me that my wife had been in an accident. He assured me that she and my daughter were OK but that the accident was pretty bad. It was pretty lucky that this guy had come across them and that he had a cell phone. This was sometime around 1990 and cell phones were still fairly rare. I don't remember what I did with the other kids but I jumped into the other car and headed out to find them. As you can guess, Lisa had taken the gravelled short cut and if anyone knows Lisa it would be a pretty good guess that she was going quite fast. As she was booking it down the road her left tire got caught in the loose gravel on the side of the road. The road had been fairly recently graded so the gravel was quite loose and quite deep. The gravel pulled her into the left ditch but she was skilled enough to pull the car back up out of the ditch but as she came onto the road the small little Geo didn't have enough clearance and the car bottomed out and that flipped the car. I'm not a forensic scientist but by analyzing the damage to the car and from Lisa's eye witness account, the car apparently flipped end for end (not side to side) twice and they ended up in the opposite ditch on their wheels. Every single window in the car was completely shattered and gone, there was not a single panel on the car that didn't have damage to it either. Lisa's coat sleeve was torn and filled with gravel because apparently her shoulder had been dragged on the gravel road. When she came to a stop Lisa noticed her glasses were gone but out of instinct she reached down and picked her glasses up out of her lap. After all of that her glasses were sitting in her lap. Weird. The car doors didn't work so they climbed out of the windows. They were completely un-hurt except for a few cuts from flying glass. It was a real blessing that I have my wife and daughter here today and it is all due to the fact that they were wearing their seat belts. To this day Kira is a fanatic about wearing seat belts. They saved her life. The accident happened pretty close to where the "X" is located on the map. I got there and the police had already been called but hadn't arrived. I didn't want to wait for them so I loaded up Kira and Lisa and I picked my rear view mirror up off the road for a souvenir, found Kira's gym bag in the ditch somewhere and then I took them into the hospital to be checked out. It didn't look like anything was wrong with them but after looking at the car I couldn't help but believe that something had to be wrong and maybe they were not feeling it because of the shock. It turned out that they were fine. I'm blessed to have my wife and daughter and I do not like gravel roads.