I learned yesterday that a female friend, whom I'll call Liza, was killed over the weekend in a car crash in Ohio. Apparently she was driving a little tiny car on an offramp from I-77 and got into a head on collision with a pickup truck. Apparently she was not drunk and there is no evidence the other driver was either AFAIK. The pickup driver was only moderately injured and appears to be a white man who has no history of this sort of thing.
What is relevant is that Liza DID have a history of car crashes. She was never drunk or on substances as far as I know. She was just not someone who took driving safety all that serious, even after one good wreck-also in a tiny car-put in a hospital for a month and destroyed her pelvis so badly they took out her uterus and a foot of bowel.
Liza was a girl I met when working at a poo-poo butt call center job several years ago. She and I hit it off as friends but there never was any romance involved. I was somewhat physically attracted to her , but her history of divorces made me wary, and I never pushed the relationship in that direction. She was by her own admission "a flawed girl" (we were both in our early forties then, she was a little older) but she was intelligent enough, she was clean and neat, and she was Politically Incorrect in an impish way. She told me that she'd been fairly promiscuous once but never, never with blacks, "spicanos", or other nonwhites. She told me how revolted she was to see white women with mulatto children in the hospital or doctors' offices.
What was interesting is that she was way overqualified for the job we were doing. She had a masters' degree in a health care field and was qualified in a couple of below-doctor-level health care billets and could have been making a lot more money, in field. She said she couldn't take the stress and was doing something easier for a while. I was serious enough that I paid ten bucks to the state to verify her qualifications as genuine, that her claims were not a figment of her imagination. I even called a doctor she mentioned she'd worked for for "an employment reference". He had nothing but the highest recommendation for her professionally and said he'd like to have her back.
She had gone broke-not bankrupt, broke-and was digging her way out by working the call center job and doing an eBay business on her time off. I really liked Liza as a person despite her failings in the driving as well as marriage and sexual behavior departments. She had issues physically stemming from a bad car crash which cropped up from time to time.
After about a year on the job, she told me she needed to buy another car. She showed me an ad for a Ford/L-M dealer and was looking at the smallest car they had. I noticed that they had brand new Mercury Grand Marquises-V-6 strippers but with automatic and air-for what even then was an unbelievably low price, just slightly over the econobox. I pointed out that the Gran Marq was probably, along with the Ford Crown Vic and the Town Car the best car Ford made and maybe the best made by any domestic manufacturer, and also a lot safer than the little s___box she wanted.
She looked at me as though I had suggested she jump into a cesspool. "That's a damn old man car!"
I pointed out that the cops drove nothing but Ford Crown Vics, essentially the identical car. She was having nothing to do with the old man car and that was that. She bought the little S-box and that was that. The fact that she had nearly died in one of those six or seven years ago just didn't register at all.
Apparently, she had a wreck in that particular car a year later and it was insurance totalled, and the car she was killed in was the insurance replacement for that wrecked one. She apparently wasn't hurt badly in that crash.
A little after that, I happened to meet her older sister-they were almost identical in appearance-and she told me Liza had had at least three other wrecks starting with the mint green '66 Mustang their dad fixed up for her as a high school graduation present. Everyone in the family assumed she would be killed in a car wreck someday, she said.
As she wanted, there was no funeral and she was cremated today. The family is going to scatter her ashes and her belongings will be given to charity, except each family member will keep one item if they so desire. I got a call from her sister yesterday and she offered to let me have something if i wanted it. I asked her to send me the little ceramic Kermit the Frog pencil holder she had on her desk at work if she came across it.
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