This story is a hoot in retrospect, but at the time, I didn't laugh much. After all, how many mothers can say that their daughter ran over them with the car? Today we can laugh at how comical, or frightening, the scene must have been for anyone who happened to see this assault in progress. I'm sure they also got an earful.
Jill says it was the afternoon that she had passed her driver's test and received her driver's license. I declare that this is just an excuse for dimwitted behavior in a moment of confusion. We both were certainly confused, though for different reasons.
Jill, along with her friend Dawn, was driving somewhere, perhaps to take Dawn home, and I was going to walk the few blocks from our house to downtown Havelock. Jill agreed to drop me off on her way through town, so I went along riding in the back seat, passenger side. I wanted to go to the drug store, so I asked her to stop directly across from it. I remember distinctly saying the word "stop" in my request. Evidently, she didn't quite get my meaning.
Unfortunately for me there was a car behind us, and I'm sure that makes a new driver a little nervous and uncomfortable. No new driver wants cars honking at them on their first outing, though I am positive that wouldn't have effected me if it had been my mother as the victim. Nevertheless, as I opened the back door and began to step out, Jill was paying more attention to the car behind her, nevermind that I was halfway out of the car hanging desparately to the car door. Jill's car never stopped. It just kept rolling. Forward. Over my foot and up onto my ankle. All the while I was saying to her, louder and louder, "Jill. Jill! Stop!! JILL!!! STOP!!!"
Finally Jill stopped with my foot still braced between the asphalt and the rubber tire. "BACK UP!" I screamed at her.
She pulled forward.
"NO! REVERSE!" I screamed it over and over. What part of this didn't she get? I was being run over by a two-thousand pound machine, and I didn't want to die! But poor Jill was so befuddled and frightened that she didn't know where the gearshift was. I still think she was frightened of the car behind her. Running over her dear, sweet, helpless, dying mother just wasn't important at the moment. She just didn't want to hold up traffic!
When Jill finally put the car in reverse, and I had freed my foot from under her car, I finished stepping out of the car, and, in severe pain, I stepped away from the car and slammed the car door. Jill shifted into drive and quickly drove away, leaving me standing in the middle of Havelock Avenue, watching her leave me in the proverbial dust and wondering how I was going to hobble around town with a broken foot or ankle and bruises up to my knee, not to mention how was I going to get home?
My wounds were very limited. Regrettably, but thankfully for my daughter. I was able to navigate my errands and walk back home again. My ankle swelled quite a bit, and it was, indeed, bruised. But I had no real reason to do anything more than scold Jill's ability to become befuddled at my expense. I'm sure it took a very long time for me to get up enough nerve to let Jill deliver me anywhere in her car again. And now we laugh about it, or at least, she does.
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