Woodard Wednesday: The first time I should have died

Not the lightest of titles, is it?  Better than, "the second time I should have died," right?  Or the ever popular, "why didn't I die that day?"  We could go on, but perhaps I'll tell you why I am being so morbid...

I almost died...

More than once...

My favorite color is yellow...
(I'll periodically try to lighten this up with stupidity.  Now felt good for dose one)

Easter is soon approaching, this year marking my 17th anniversary of what feels like borrowed time.  Easter Sunday of 1999 could have been my last day.  This is a story of fear and crisis, acts of desperation, facing the unknown.  Oh yeah, I am in it too.

And since I am telling it, I'll be the dashing prince.

close enough

Approaching sundown I took myself, along with my 10 year old cousin, to a gas station to refuel the beast.  I drove a Dodge Ram pickup with tricked out wheels that were stylishly low to the ground and glimmering with chrome.  They had also somehow done something jazzy to the muffler so I sounded like quite the badass driving about.  Epically stupid.

Perhaps I was compensating for something?  For more on that, please see the blog penned by my police chief grandfather entitled: "My grandson goes to what kind of bars?"

I digress...

I was a student at the time, knee deep in undergraduate work.  You know what I wasn't knee deep in? Money.  Quite the opposite.  That day I worked an extra shift at the veterinary hospital to earn $20 in cash.  And no, it wasn't a lot of money back then either.

Getting to gas station, I went inside to prepay the $20.  With my wallet freshly emptied, off I went to fuel my dude-mobile.

Just as the ticker on the petrol machine was approaching the magic 20 buck mark, a man approached me very aggressively.  He was dressed in baggy jeans, a t-shirt, and a red handkerchief tied just under his eyes.  His approach was intentional.  He had an objective.

He also had a gun which promptly found it's intended target, my chest.

In a crisis, people say amazing things happen to them.  Time stands still.  Everything becomes clear.  They suddenly find a superhuman ability to channel a hidden martial artist and kung fu their assailant's tookus.

Yeah, none of that coolness happened for me.  I did all I knew to do: hold really still and hope the bad man would go away thinking I was not so interesting.

Strangely, he seemed to be incapable of waiver.  Our dance continued.

With face half veiled and gun at the ready, the young man demanded my wallet.  I complied.  He instructed me to open my wallet and show him the contents.  I complied.  Upon seeing the empty reality of said wallet, he demanded I produce some cash or he would kill me.  I could not comply.

I had no cash.  The only cash I had was used to pay for my gasoline.  He didn't believe me.

"Give me your money or I'll fucking shoot you."  I didn't doubt his sincerity.

Remember how I said people can do cool stuff when faced with a crisis?  Want to know my superpower?  It's impressive.  I stayed super calm.  I also achieved superior vision.  My calmness and my super vision gave me some critical tools.  What did I do with my calm?  What did I see?  The tale will tell itself, dear reader.  How are you supposed to click on the annoying add at the bottom of this post if I tell you the good stuff now?  Let's continue.

I explained to the man that I had no cash, which he could see for himself.  Being a non-smoker I kept loose change in the ashtray of the car, which I offered to him, to which he seemed unimpressed.  After a few rounds of give-me-the-money-you-don't-have-or-I'll-turn-you-into-a-less-alive-person,  he finally conceded.  The day was won!

Or not so much.

He asked me where my keys were.  I calmly told him they were inside the ignition.

Perhaps this is a good time to remind you of a detail of the story from earlier.  Remember who I had with me?  Yeah, my 10 year old cousin.  Guess where he was from the beginning of the story up until now?  If you guessed the passenger seat of my absurd truck, you are a big winner.

Nothing like a front row seat to this show.  So glad I was able to open his young eyes to some culture.

Our villain told me to get into the car.  At this point I realized the gravity of the situation.  Had I been upset by this point about my current pickle?  Oh yeah!  But when I saw the fear in my 10 year-old cousins eyes, I suddenly realized how bad a pickle this really was.  I'm talking super spicy pickle here.  The one you had better not touch your eyes for at least an hour after eating.

I asked our gunned man if the kid could get out of the car.  I didn't know what was about to happen, but I thank God I had the wherewithal to figure that it shouldn't have a witness.  The man agreed and I instructed him to get out of the car and go inside.  There was that calm stuff again.  I was really getting good at this.

I was told to start the car.  I did.  I was told to get out of the car.  Done.  I watched as this stranger with a covered face and a gun got into my car.  I stood.

And here is where my second super power really made itself known.  My vision became something otherworldly.  I swear I could have taken detailed images of things miles away and remembered them in perfect detail.  I could have seen colors in that sunset that an artist would have only dreamed.  Everything in my body shut down except my vision.

And what did I see?  How did I use this gift?  What did I memorize?

I saw the face of this young man.  I saw his eyes.

We had the briefest of moments where our eyes locked, him now sitting in my truck with the door ajar and gun still truly aimed and ready, me just a pace away.  In my memory now I would swear it lasted for minutes, that glance.  But I'm sure it was only a second or two.

This is a tale of fear and crisis, acts of desperation, facing the unknown.  That is what I saw in that moment.  I saw depth.  I saw sorrow.  I saw anger.  I saw panic.  I saw terror.

May I live 1,000 years and never forget those eyes.  And may I live twice as long and never have to see them again.

***Chad pauses for a breath and a moment of reflective appreciation***

And that's it.  That is where the story ends.  The rest is just little details that are inconsequential now.  Our intense moment of connection ended as briefly as it began, he closed the door and drove away in haste.

But one last little detail so as to not keep you wanting.  The police officer who arrived on the scene sometime later became a source of information, that night and beyond.  He told me great things, things that added quite significantly to my tale.

Turns out, the situation I found myself in that night was part of a gang initiation.  To catch us all up, a gang initiation is some sort of action or duty that a person is tasked with doing.  Once done, they have earned their right into a lifetime membership of their gang.  I won't go into details here, but people will go to great lengths to join some of these gangs, often finding them the only source of hope and salvation for their life situation.  But that's another story.

For this particular gang, the initiation was exactly as I've written out above.  Hold up a person, steal their wallet and money, take their car.  Oh, just one last bit: you were also supposed to shoot your victim in the chest before driving away.

About a week later, exactly that happened.  At another gas station less than a mile from mine, a man was carjacked near sundown and shot in the chest.  He was pronounced dead on the scene.

The cop who helped me that night offered this information.  He said I should have been that man.  He said that the assailant was most likely the same kid that held me at gunpoint.  He said his interaction with me would have been seen by the gang as a failure.  He did not complete his mission.  No shot was fired.

When I think back to that day, and even as I sit here writing this now all these many years later, I am filled with so many emotions.  A reminder of the preciousness of life.  A sincere and palpable fear that still echoes in me today.  A sadness for the reality of this young man's life.

My eyes were opened that day.  My vision was given to me.  I saw.

I saw how easy it would have been for me to have died.  I saw how easy it would have been for him to have pulled that trigger.

That day I saw, but today I see.  I see that my life is precious.  I see what I have available to me.  I see my life for what it is: a chance to wake up in the morning and smile.  I see my purpose.

17 years ago this Sunday, I saw.  Today I still see.  And what I see is beautiful, beautiful beyond words.

May my eyes close only after they have seen all they are destined to see, and only then, close peacefully and with the knowledge and contentment of a life fully lived.

Thank you for reading.

Wedding bells be ringin'

Despite the dreadfully boring nature of my everyday blog entry, this one just might prove to be spicier than usual. I have a story to tell. A story I anticipate having only this one chance to offer.

Before I can get into the juicy details of aforementioned story, a bit of background is needed. Before I can get into that, a disclaimer is necessary. This blog is loosely based on my life as a triathlete. This story has very little, if nothing, to do with that at all.  Read on anyway. It’s adorable.

10 years ago I was fortunate enough to meet the person with whom I plan to spend the remainder of my life. We met in a classy, if not intimate, setting full of intrigue and romantic undertones. That’s right, it was Match.com 

At least it wasn’t Craig’s list (not that there is anything shady about meeting someone there…)

We conversed at great length via email and got through those pesky first date questions.  “Where are you from?  What do you do?  What psychopathic tendencies bubble up during the holidays?” You know, normal stuff.

After a relatively epic match of email tennis, we decided to meet.  This is how an episode of Dateline usually begins. In a dramatic voice-over with haunting music underscoring, the announcer says something like, “stay tuned for how an innocent meeting turned diabolical. How online networking ended in amputation for this tragic couple.”

Sounds exciting, right?

Well luck for us, there has yet to be any amputations.  In fact, things have gone pretty darn well. But I mustn’t get ahead of myself.

We met. We sparked. We brunched. Terrifically When Harry Met Sally.

On the way back from brunch, I got an unexpected surprise. I was the unhappy victim of a pigeon bombing.  Yes indeed, I took a direct hit on the right pectoral muscle by a steamy blob of pigeon poo.  Romance of this magnitude knows no bounds.

We did what we could.  While he rushed off to a hot dog vendor to procure some napkins, I reasonably ran frantically in circles with arms flailing overhead whilst emitting a shockingly high-pitched squeal.  I drew attention.  Tourists took photos.  I am not proud of my performance, but at least I got some good exposure.

After an attempted clean up job street-side, we thought it best to go back to his apartment to properly clean my shirt.  I am still convinced he had this whole thing planned just to get me back to his apartment.  Like he needed a plan…

And that is when it happened.  Forgive the terrible sappiness I’m about to commit to this blog, but while we were cleaning the pigeon poo off of my shirt, we were overwhelmed by the romantic notes of the moment and shared our first kiss. Aside from the poo part, it was really quite romantic. And here is the sappy part: it was in that moment, that shared experience of ironic satire and ridiculous happenstance, that one moment would have the power over me to make time stand still. It was truly in that moment that I first felt the feeling of hope and companionship that I had so often craved. I felt at home; I felt at peace. Pigeon poo be damned, this was who I was meant to be with.

Take that, Nicholas Sparks!

Well, long story short (too late), we started dating immediately. I had moved into his place within 3 months and we had adopted a dog, our sweet lovable pup Mick, a few months after that.

We were the envy of all of our lesbian friends.  They only thought they moved fast.  We had set the bar.

At year 3, we moved to the lovely state of New Jersey that had just recently passed a law allowing Civil Unions to be recognized.  There were no sweeping or romantic gestures on this one.  We knew were committed to each other and so we did it. 

The only trouble was that Paul, mystery man of the story, was not at the time out to his family.  With them not knowing about this part of his life, we were unable to invite them to the civil union. The celebration was fierce and our love was unquestionable, but it was a sad occurrence that his family was unable to attend and share such a special moment with us. We have since met, concerned reader, and we couldn’t get along more merrily than if we were drawn by Walt Disney himself.

Let’s breeze over the next 7 years, shall we?  We adopted another pup, princess Maggie, and are proud to say we are still the boastful Dad’s of an ever-youthful Mick.  I managed to get a doctorate degree and open my own business, and Paul managed to save the world a few times over.  Not bad for 7 years.

Now to the juicy part.  Your patience is appreciated.

With our impending 10^th anniversary looming, we decided to book ourselves a celebratory cruise to commemorate such a milestone.  But not only did we want to celebrate, we also wanted both sides of our families to celebrate at our sides.  At the delight of Celebrity Cruises and American Express, we booked a 7-night cruise for the 2 of us, along with both sides of our family.  Let’s not forget the 4 friends who also were able to join bringing the total to 14 folks.

The plans were made.  The flights were booked.  We were finally getting the opportunity to include Paul’s family in the beautiful celebration that is our life together.

And then, as fate would have it, a dramatic event took place that would change the course of this story quite significantly.

Paying heed to the ever-changing sentiment of our country, New Jersey made into law that unions between two people of the same gender would be recognized as a legal marriage. This news came on the heels of the US Supreme Court revolutionizing how the national government would define marriage. 

After 10 years of a committed and loving relationship, we were finally given the opportunity to stand in front of our friends and family and legally declare our union as a married couple.

And that, dear readers, is exactly what we just did!

As of January 5, 2014, I am legally someone’s husband.  On this date, the government of both my state and my country have recognized the loving relationship I have been fortunate enough to help build over the last decade. I wish I had the vocabulary to express what this means to me.  As a substitute, my kick-ass new platinum with diamond accent ring will have to suffice.

But here is the best part: our families didn’t know!  According to them they were flying to Puerto Rico for an anniversary cruise, not a wedding cruise!

To have had the opportunity to share this incredible event with both sides of our family is damn near more that I could have ever hoped for.  So much so that I don’t even care that I ended the previous sentence with a preposition. 

There were tears of joy and photos of the surprised faces upon learning of the true intentions of this trip.  There were moments of jubilation and times of reflection with those who know us best.  But above all, there was love and compassion shared between two people and between a group of family and friends.

I count myself stupidly lucky to have found such a person in my life.  I find myself overwhelmed to have the opportunity to legally and publically make that union recognizable in both the eyes of our government, but also the eyes of our family and friends.  I only hope that the rest of my life will be as enriching, educational, joyful, and fulfilling as the last 10 years have been.  Perhaps a request for such happiness is unreasonable and the notions of a dreamer. 

I’ve always been a dreamer.  I don’t intend to change now.

Totally not our rings.  New pics to be posted when I read the stupid manual to my new camera.