"Thankful I'm alive"

Yesterday, at my family's Thanksgiving feast, we all were asked what we were thankful for.

I was pretty much caught off-guard by this question.  I didn't want to say anything flip or rude, so I blurted something out fast, like "Thankful I'm alive."

Back in June 9, 1989, I was working at what was Crown Shoes over on Hyde Park Avenue and getting change from what was then the Suffolk Franklin bank.  I was crossing the street and I got hit by a car.

To say that Someone Upstairs was keeping an eye out for me was an understatement.  I walked - yes, walked - away with two stitches in my head (the only pain I felt was the lidocaine burning and numbing my head) and numerous scrapes.  I was well over six feet then, but anyone smaller would have easily been dead.

When it came to that revelation, it was one resting in my subconscious until it got jostled by accident.  Awaking the slumbering part of my life that was bad at one moment but turned out very lucky, as it were.  Sidney Friedman, the MASH psychiatrist played wonderfully by Allan Arbus, would be the one sitting in front of me, asking why I said that, and then after recounting what happened, would drolly say, "It's funny how what happened earlier in life comes back at the strangest times."

So I am thankful I'm alive. And I am forever grateful Someone Upstairs thought I wasn't ready for wings yet on June 9, 1989.