Caught in His Arms

by Lloyd B. Abrams

January 31, 1977, my wife’s birthday. It was freezing that morning – only nine degrees. Still, I zipped up an insulated full-body suit, backed my Honda CB360 motorcycle out of our garage, started it up, and headed west into Brooklyn from Freeport on the parkway.

It was the last day of the term in our high school – a day for handing out report cards and not much else. It was certainly not a day to take off.

I arrived at school 45 minutes later and parked my Honda in the custodian’s garage. It took quite a while for my lips, fingers and toes to thaw out. Then I went about my business wasting six hours and twenty minutes on this very-little-to-do day until it was time to clock out.

Before I left school, I used the bathroom in the boiler room, something that I generally did not do. Back then, 34 years ago, it was much easier to wait until later.

It had warmed up – perhaps into the high teens or low twenties. I got on the Belt Parkway at the Rockaway Parkway circle and headed home. I quickly moved over to the left lane and sped up to 65 or so. A highway truck was stopped in the left lane, so I steered the bike to pass between it and the slowed-down traffic in the center lane. And then …

I came to. I was flat on my face. My groin was aching. An ambulance was already there. Later, I realized that I must have been unconscious for some time. A guy stood over me asking if I was carrying anything – drugs maybe? I wasn’t and didn’t know why he asked. I stood up and was helped into the ambulance. One of my leather boots was broken, but my foot wasn’t. The plastic shield over my helmet was smashed and parts of my body suit were shredded.

I was taken to Interboro Hospital, on Linden Boulevard on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. Its name has changed since, and I don’t know if a hospital is still there. The worst was when I was lying on a cold steel table and an intern was trying, without success, to insert a catheter into my penis. Thankfully, a nurse came by and suggested that she take over.

By that time, my wife had arrived. She was still recovering from an ectopic pregnancy. She had had emergency surgery at Nassau County Medical Center a week or so before. There hadn’t even been enough time to prep her. Later, she said she had an out-of-body experience while lying there. She saw herself floating above, and at the same time, she saw herself from above lying on the bed.

Some say it was a miracle I survived the crash. I could have died from sepsis if my bladder hadn’t been emptied. I could have suffered from major physical trauma, going up and over the bike as I did at 65 and landing face first. I could have been run over. As it turned out, all I lost was my left testicle which would end up atrophying because either a mirror or the gas tank cap severed a testicular blood vessel. I came home from the hospital nine days later.

My wife, while recuperating at home, said that a cold feeling passed over her and she shuddered about the time the accident occurred. She knew something had happened to me. And she claims that God was there to catch me. Allowed me to live. Allowed us both to live.

Twelve days after the accident, three days after I arrived home, my father died just one day after his sixty-fifth birthday. Perhaps in some cosmic, heavenly deal, he had surrendered his life in order to save ours.

– Based on a prompt from the Writer’s Beit Midrash, Skirball Center November 28, 2011 involving “a time I collided …” and “God is in this place”

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Postscript: Several weeks after, I drove to the garage in Brooklyn to pay the towing and storage costs and to make arrangements for the badly damaged motorcycle to be trucked back. The probable cause of the accident: a bungee cord had snapped off the luggage rack, wrapped around the rear axle, causing the wheel to seize, and flipping me forward.

Rev 2 / December 27, 2011

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December 2011…Copyright © 2011, Lloyd B. Abrams