Living Proof

     In today's world, people tend to record every single detail of life as it happens, so as long as the technology doesn't degrade, there is a record of everything that happens, significant or not.  But that wasn't always true.
    If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, did it make a sound? The corollary could be that if some event occurred, and there is no trace left of it, either technologically recorded, or in the human mind, did that event really happen?
  When we were young, our neighbor was Sandy, and she often appears in my mind. I see her likeness in the face of the local American Idol contender, whose teeth and smile are so similar to Sandy's.
   The likeness triggers  a long ago event involving Sandy. I know it happened, though even shortly after, the narrative was altered. Like the thousand and thousands of books and movies we've invested time in over the years, only certain filmy scenes or chapters emerge, and this is one of them.
   Sandy and I were in our kitchen late one evening.  We were probably waiting for Dorothy to come home from a date.  Sandy and she talked on a regular basis, about everything. They were still teenagers.
   A friend showed up, after his coaching a basketball game, I think, and offered to drive us to a dairy bar in Stillwater to get milkshakes. Here is where the clarity of memory kicks in.  It was winter, a typical winter then with deep snowbanks that seemed almost permanent in those years. We were approaching the intersection of Route 67 and 40, and for some reason, quite uncharacteristic of him, our driver said, "Let's blow through the stoplight," which was red in our direction. He did so, and Boom, smack into the side of a car that was traveling down Route 40 from the Easton direction. We knew some of the people in the other car, including a woman who was pregnant. (Each time I ever met her, even years later, she alway reminded me of this accident.)
   There were no serious injuries.  Cars were big and ironclad in those years, the late 1950's, but they also lacked seatbelts. I'd been sitting in the middle of the front seat, and the impact drove my knee into a plastic knob below the dashboard. The knob shattered and my knee still bears the scar. Sandy was on the outside of the front seat, and she was thrown forward, smacking her head into the front window. Sandy was stunned, my knee was bleeding, the police arrived, and I have no clear memory of the events immediately following.
    I do know that the circumstances leading up to the accident were significantly altered in the view of at least one other person.  In the annals of time, this happening is a non-event, currently real only in my recollection.