The Datsun
It was definitely my fault
One time I almost killed my brother.
No, that isn’t the truth AT ALL. But, I did cause him to damage his finger so badly that he still has a scar to this day.
I guess I was around eight or nine years old. The family was getting ready to go somewhere. I’ve tried to remember where. The events of the day meant that I forgot how it all started.
My father had a Datsun B210 in the color “poop brown.” I think that is what the sticker said. I don’t know the year it was made, but it must have been the late seventies. It was a 5-speed manual transmission. Eventually, I would learn to drive it around the church parking lot and believe I had mastered a stick shift only to find later that Dad was basically driving with no clutch and I had to learn how to change gears when the clutch actually had a lot a play to it.
I did, by the way. I prefer it. And, I’ve learned that valet parking attendants and thieves in my city do not have this same skill. In one of those instances, it comes in real handy to have a manual transmission vehicle. In the other, not so much.
I was ready to go before everyone else in the house. So, I was playing around in the front yard with my Adoption Dolls. (An Adoption Doll is the poor person’s version of the famous Cabbage Patch Kids that were ALL THE RAGE in the 80’s. Adoption Dolls were made by a person, not a machine. They cost a whole lot less. I had two. I’m sure they were made by someone in our church.) So, Dollies and I were playing outside waiting for the grown-ups to be ready for wherever we were going. It almost FEELS like it was my brother’s high school graduation, but surely to goodness that can’t be true. If it was, I owe him more of an apology than I already thought!
We lived on a street in a town that was really more like a highway. It was two-lane, but the speed limit was about 50 miles per hour. Our house, next to the church, was the only house on this particular stretch of road. Across the street? Cow pasture. On the other side of the house? Cow pasture. Our house was also at the bottom of a very long and somewhat steep hill. By the time people were passing our mailbox, they were flying! My mother almost always turned around in the yard before pulling onto the street. Several dogs and a couple of cats were run over on that street. It was a busy street. That’s what I’m saying. It could be dangerous.
Dollies and I decided to sit in Daddy’s car and play with the gear shift. I had done it before. No problem. On this particular day, Daddy had parked the car, left it in gear and not put on the emergency brake. Our driveway had just the slightest slant to it. The incline was at its lowest at the street. You see where I’m going, right?
This part I remember. I remember it so clearly that it makes my head hurt to think about it. The incline was just so slight, but it was enough so that when I was pretending to be a NASCAR driver in that little brown car and I shifted the gear feeling like a superstar, the car started rolling toward the street. Not fast, but on its way to the busy street nonetheless.
I was just a little kid. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew enough to know this WAS NOT GOOD. I sat and tried to figure out what to do. I didn’t know anything about parking brakes or brakes brakes or anything other than that moving that gear shift felt really neat. I jumped OUT of the car. It wasn’t moving fast. I started to run to the house and got so scared I was going to be killed for the stupid thing I had done, that I ran and JUMPED BACK INTO THE CAR. I guess I hoped I would figure out something when I did. I sat on Dollies because I had just left them in the car to die!
I jumped OUT of the car again and started running for the front door screaming. I assume that my brother had seen some of this madness through the window or heard me scream or something. Whatever happened, by the time I was running away from the car which was slowly but surely making its way for the street, he was flying out of the front door.
Our front porch was a small one, relatively speaking. It had wrought iron railings around it. You’ve probably seen the same design. It used to be very popular. The wrought iron had this real cute pattern that included curled pieces just under the main part of the railing going down the steps of the front porch.
My brother did not take the steps. He was wearing his class ring on his right hand. He saw his baby sister in trouble and he ran to help. He grabbed the railing with his right hand and jumped over it and off the porch to the yard bypassing the three steps. As he did that ring caught just right on one of those cute little curly Q pieces of wrought iron. The ring stopped. My brother did not.
He paid no attention to what had happened to his finger. He ran to the car, jumped into it, and stopped it from going into traffic at what seems like the last possible minute. The car was at the end of the driveway.
I was standing near the garage crying. He sat on Dollies too!
He never did find his class ring. I wonder if he thinks about that and still gets mad at me. I don’t remember him ever being really mad at me about that, though. Mom was.
When we were back inside, he realized that not only was his class ring gone, but most of his finger was too. It wasn’t broken, as far as I remember, but you could see the bone. My mother worked to wrap it up in a towel to take him to the hospital and yelled at me the whole time.
I only remember my dad saying,
“Honey, I didn’t set the parking brake. This was my fault.”
As I sometimes say to my own children, “Spoiled ROTTEN!”
