Thursday, April 21, 2011

Dead Man on the Ground

There was no sense of transition. 

One instant one place, the next hovering telephone-pole high over the lilac bushes in the yard.

Disembodiment is hard to get used to, mostly because while I knew I wasn't attached to my physical form, it felt little different from when I was, except for the lack of aches and pains, and floating in the air and all.

Below me was me.

I looked kind of crumpled up and damaged lying on the ground practically underneath the kayak trailer in the driveway. There was blood oozing out of my one temple, and my ubiquitous eyeglasses were hanging askew from my ashen face, unbroken, but badly bent.

My glasses, that is. Not my face.

It was still daylight, and the last thing I recall doing as a captive of gravity was bending down to pick up a bagged newspaper near the street. It was a newspaper, incidentally, delivered weekly, un-asked for, and unread.

How it had become my undoing, I did not know.

Then, in answer to my confusion, time unwound backwards a bit as I floated, in no rush to touch down.

I witnessed crumpled me suddenly arise moving in reverse, dropping the paper I had attempted to pick up, and then moving away from it, again in reverse.

At the point where I had apparently decided to retrieve the paper in the first place, the 3-D HD real-life rewind stopped, and began to run forward.

The loud roaring of a large, overloaded dump truck from some landscape company rumbled toward me from the highway, arcing around the bend at the top of the hill near our house and barreling toward me like something out of a B-class action film.

On-planet me hardly seemed to notice. Immaterial me was a bit startled, which was strange in the extreme, not having any physical senses, but what do I know?

At precisely the moment I bent down to pick up the offending newspaper, a fist-sized, decorative, polished river stone used in expensive landscape edging bounced out of the careening truck's cargo bed and headed unerringly toward my head. It looked like a primitive projectile shot from a mechanical dinosaur.

I watched the rock, which at this point was traveling at almost the same velocity as the speeding truck, strike my temple as if I were reenacting the David and Goliath saga in reverse, and modernized.

In my version, Goliath, the truck, slung the stone at diminutive me, as David, and I went down like a felled gnome.

Floating me winced in pain. Physical me hit the gravel driveway in a bleeding crumpled lump.

The rest is visionary history.

I realized that the impending reentry into my physical shell was not going to be fun.

It was going to hurt, and I looked forward to it not at all.

Then I heard footsteps running toward me from the house, and a panicked cry from my youngest child.

"Daddy!" she screamed. "Are you OK?"

...And I opened my eyes from the ground, reawakening with a start that sent shockwaves through my brain.

"Ow!" I croaked weakly, as she knelt down next to me on the stones, trembling in fear.

I could see tears in her eyes even without my glasses.

"I'll be fine," I said, trying to smile. I can only imagine what a ghastly picture I presented.

I managed to hold her as she burst into sobs of relief.

"I thought you were dead, Daddy!"

"It's OK, Sweetheart. It's OK."