Watch your head isn't always about ducking

I always liked tales about long ago that started off "it was a dark and stormy night".  Would love to have used it here but aside from being dark that night wasn't stormy at all.

It was a night on a road that had recently been repaved and back in the day that meant a lot of sand.  I think probably they actually oiled it?  and then sanded the hell out of it and let the vehicles driving on it grind the sand into the oil and make it "pavement".  Not really sure.

I do know that it was one of the times that my brother was wearing "the helmet" so I was wearing a head scarf, corduroy jacket, jeans and riding on the back of his buddy's bike.  As opposed to the back of my brother's bike where I usually perched.

We had been running errands around town and were heading back on a road we had recently come over.  I almost mentioned to my driver to remember the corner and the sand but didn't want to be a wimp.  I have since gotten over that - if I have something to say to anyone who holds my life in their hands I say it!

The short version is obviously my driver was memory impaired, we slid, we went down and I remember starting to spit the sand out of my mouth and not much else until the emergency room visit.

I was banged and bruised and scraped but I only had a "minor" concussion.  And that is the real message I want to pass along here.  Technically there might be such a thing as a minor concussion - in reality not so much.  At the time I had two small children and once I got out of the hospital I discovered that I was incapable of deciding how to dress them in the morning or what to make them for lunch.

Now that's a small issue you say?  Not when it reaches the point that someone has to lay out the lunch materials for you every day or else you end up dissolved in tears and completely unable to pick out the food to feed your kids!

Oh, and when you open your mouth to speak?  It's very interesting to see what comes out - because it bears no resemblance to what you intended to say.  Worse yet you can't remember the right word, you just know that the one that came out is wrong.  And this went on for much longer than it took my face to grow a new set of skin.

If I had been wearing a helmet when I hit the pavement I am pretty sure that I would still have been banged and scraped but I would have been more than able to make the decision between peanut butter and fluff or scrambled eggs going forward.

I think that incident (among other things) was instrumental in my deciding to ride my own motorcycle - at least then I could pretty much trust the driver's judgment!

Not all accidents can be avoided but play the odds and do the best you can to "watch your head"!