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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
May 21, 2006
Published as Family History
in a Gramma Letter dated October 25, 1994.
© 1994 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Wood Duck, 1979
© 1979 by Bud Grossmann
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CARS COLLIDING WITH LIVING THINGS
Tuesday, October 25, 1994
Dear Gramma,
I ran into a moth with my car a few days ago. So why do I consider that event worth reporting to you? After all, in your driving days, you probably dirtied your windshield and radiator grill with bugs numerous as the stars in the sky of a Wisconsin summer night. So what’s the big deal, Buddy, smacking one itty-bitty moth with your car?
I ran into this creature—or it ran into me—on a sunny afternoon when I was doing about thirty miles per hour in my van just a few blocks from my home, here in Honolulu. And it wasn’t itty-bitty. The moth was big enough to make an audible thump against my windshield, and it left a powdery brown-gray smear across my field of vision as broad as my hand with my fingers spread.
I recall precisely the fraction of a second when I was aware of the big blur of insect crossing my path of travel. In the next moment, I felt the fatal collision of body and auto glass and saw the residue of wing dust glistening in the sun.
The moth’s crushed body was flung through the air, past my side window, onto the roadway. The event took only an instant, but I realized what I had hit, and I heard a whisper in my heart: Life is fragile!
This was “only” a moth—a real big moth, yes—but only a moth. Still, the whisper declared, Life is fragile. You see, Gramma, at almost exactly this same spot on the highway, on another sunny afternoon this past June, I watched helplessly when a Cadillac ahead of me drove over a schoolboy who suddenly stepped out from the shoulder of the road. The kid survived, and he’s out of the hospital now, but he’s still not out of the woods. He’s still not back on his feet.
When something unexpected happens to me in a flash, thoughts tumble and tangle through my mind. Thump! went the moth, and my mind went: Moth! Schoolboy! And then, Pheasant!
Pheasant? Yes, I thought of a certain pheasant hen that my beloved wife and I transported, out of season, across state lines one August just about twenty years ago. Frances and I had visited you and Grampa the weekend before my college classes were to begin in Indiana in the fall of 1974. I don’t remember now how we got to your farm, but we headed back to campus driving a 1969 Simca 1200GL station wagon given us by my folks. Fran was at the wheel.
Only a few miles out of Rio, on Highway 16, a hen pheasant took flight from the grassy roadside and—wham!—the Simca smacked into her, and she was dead meat. A puff of feathers blew over the hood, and Fran coasted to a stop. I jumped out, checked the front of the car, and found the main course of that night’s supper slumped on top of the bumper.
Our pheasant was definitely deceased (like last week’s moth and unlike—thank God—the schoolboy I just told you about). But I know that you, Gram, have stories to tell of highway-harvested wild game whose obituaries were published prematurely. Didn’t you run into a pheasant rooster once on the way to town, toss it onto the floor of your old Nash, and—after a short stop in the post office—find the recovered fowl madly attempting to escape from the coop of the coupe? Didn’t Uncle Phil one icy winter evening salvage a red fox that thawed out and came to life in the trunk of his Plymouth?
Tell me your stories, dear Grandmother, and let’s—you and I together—thank God for the fragility and durability of Life.
I love you. Can’t wait to hear from you.
Love,
Buddy
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