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Intersecting Lives

Posted on 28. Jun, 2009 by Dave in Random Musings

Life is full of twists and turns, odds and ends, chance encounters and decisions that steer you in one direction over another. A split second decision to take a different route, to book a later flight, to meet a friend — or not.

Earlier this month I was all excited to get the new Palm Pre. But not too excited that I was going to stand in a ridiculously long line. When the morning came on Saturday, June 6th I called around to a few local Sprint stores to see if they had any phones. The Sprint Store in downtown Silver Spring had some left, with about 20 people in line. They said to come on down but no guarantees. So I did. I hopped in the car, and headed down Georgia Avenue.

On the way, I noticed there was a Sprint reseller location just south of Seminary Avenue. A quick glance didn’t seem to show a big line of people, so I pulled in. But a car was blocking the way, someone waiting for a space to open up even though there were quite a few spaces open just around the bend in the small parking lot.

So I waited. The car behind me backed out and parked in the gas station next door, then went into the Sprint Store. That person got the last Pre in stock. So, I was stuck in a line waiting to buy the phone and get it from a shipment coming later in the week. No problem, I was still fine … no big lines, good customer service. No problem.

During the hour or so I was in the store, about a half dozen or so customers bantered back and forth about the new phone. Some hadn’t decided to get it and were just checking out the demo. Others had pre-ordered and were coming in for their scheduled time to get the phone.

One of those pre-orderees got my attention. A woman in her late 30’s, early 40’s came in with four or five adorable kids in tow. You couldn’t help but notice — it was a small store, there was some waiting time, she was an attractive woman with a whole ton of precocious kids. She joined the group of customers who were talking about the phone, while her kids went through her purse and played with another phone. She said she had other daughters — six in total — but some were off playing sports. There couldn’t have been anyone in the store who didn’t remember that family.

After a while, the family left. Everyone went through the line, the order was processed and I went on my way. But the family stuck in my head, and I even mentioned it to my girlfriend. I mentioned how amazing it was this woman had all this energy, was taking care of business and running errands, dragging all these kids in tow. She made Jon and Kate Plus Eight (before all this recent sensationalism) look like amateurs.

And then I didn’t think about that family again, until Friday.

As some of you reading this know, back in the late 90’s I paid most of my way through college doing freelance reporting and photography. I was decent, even though I still don’t really know how to use a camera properly.  But since the early days of Firehouse.com and especially the last five or six years, I’ve hardly had any time (or need) to be quite the scanner chaser I once was. I did buy a new camera recently and have been toying around with it, and if something happened close by I thought maybe I’d go get some good shots. Otherwise, I’ve pretty much kept my photography in the past few months to personal stuff that I just post to Facebook and Flickr.

But Friday night was different. I had just walked in the door when I got a text message from one of these incident alert networks I’ve had for eons about an accident on Connecticut Avenue with a tree on a car with three trapped inside. A second page a few minutes later from a different service said the same. Both offered widely conflicting cross streets nearly five miles apart. Without a scanner or radio, I took a guess on which was right and off I went.

When I arrived, traffic was oddly clear despite a major thoroughfare like Connecticut Avenue being completely shut down. A few TV trucks were pulling up at the same time to the accident scene just north of East West Highway, and just down from the Chevy Chase fire station.

It was immediately clear this was an unusual scene, looking eerily familiar to scenes of a Microburst from years ago in my fire department response days at Hyattsville.

On Friday as I walked down Connecticut Avenue, the damage started to come into view slowly. A power pole was snapped, trees were down, some debris was in the road. And just beyond an ambulance from the Wheaton Rescue Squad, a minivan was under a tree. A few children, including what appeared to be an infant, were being put into an ambulance.

As I got closer, I saw the extent of the damage — the entire front passenger compartment was crushed by a massive tree limb. Bystanders had pulled several children out of the car right away. Other drivers appeared to have quickly driven up onto curbs and sidewalks to avoid the scene.

Then I did what I’d always done at accidents, fires, etc. I took some pictures. The Washington Post used a few to illustrate the story in its Saturday and Sunday editions. The Associated Press got a few, as did ABC World News Tonight. I felt like a real journalist again, which is frankly a good change of pace from the every day pressures and needs of running a business.

No names were released Friday night, only news confirming that a woman and child had been killed in the crash. Several other children, all girls, were injured. A horrendous tragedy for that family, for any family. Driving along … and in the blink of a flash of lighting and swirling of wind, just devastation.

After a day out on Saturday, I came home late and watched the news. That’s when it struck me. The Sprint store.

An initial picture of the victim flashed on the screen. She seemed familiar. Then I read the first edition of the Post’s story for Sunday online. A mother of six, a soccer coach, a woman her friends and neighbors talked about how friendly she was, and how she made connections with everyone she met. She was even described her as a “superwoman.” That I remembered, in the Sprint Store, one of the other shoppers specifically referred to the woman there as a “Supermom” since she was juggling all these kids.

Sunday morning I opened the paper. The picture of her little daughter made it abundantly clear — this was the same family. Then I watched the video report on Channel 9. A close up of the same adorable, precocious 7-year-old I remember sitting on the chair at the Sprint store playing with her mother’s pocketbook.

So I sit here now, thinking about all the things that somehow connected me to this family, the how and the why … and then some. I could only hope to have a mother of my children be as strong as she seemed to be in that store — just running an every day errand she seemed like an amazing person. She talked to strangers, she made jokes, her kids appeared to adore her — if there was a happier family that day I’d be shocked. And they were just living their daily lives.

As I think many of us do these days, I surfed the Web and found her Facebook page which was already filling with condolences. Just a week before her death, one of the mother’s Facebook status updates was “Spent the last 24 hours in Pittsburgh at a funeral while trying to remember to also celebrate life.” She mentioned in a follow-up how she was with her four oldest daughters on the trip, noting ” I had a nice 24 hours with my 4 oldest girls — bonding through sadness and a big adventure to Pittsburgh.”

Later this summer, I’m taking my own road trip to Pittsburgh for a concert. I think some good bonding will be in order.

I had already been thinking about the ‘what ifs’ earlier this week following the Metrorail disaster. My girlfriend rides the red line daily … she had just signed off to take the train home when I first heard about the crash. She mentioned something about a train stopped at Fort Totten so trains were slow. So while I was pretty sure she was safe … there was a little time where I couldn’t reach her to let her know the stopped train was actually a much larger disaster. What if she had taken an earlier train? Which direction were the trains going that had crashed? Luckily she was OK.

But others were not. Surely, there were people on that train who chose  to ride in the middle of the train that day instead of the first car. Maybe they had to hoof it up the escalator to make it. Maybe they were running late and had missed the earlier train — or got out of work earlier to make the one that crashed. It’s like those people you hear about who missed their flight — which then crashed. Even in the news today, its like pitchman Billy Mays being interviewed on TV last night about ‘bumping his head’ on a plane ride home but bragging he had a thick head … so no need to go the hospital. Then not waking up the next day.

Closer to home, it’s the stories of firefighters in recent years who tell of swapping shifts with someone so they can take the day off — only to have the person they switched with be killed in a fire.

Less dramatically, for me it was stopping in a random Sprint store, getting caught there longer than expected, and having a chance encounter with a happy family.

Moments like this really make you remember to treat every day like it is your last. You never know where these twists and turns may take you. The people you meet, even the ones you don’t really know, can impact your life — and make you think about how you live it.