The whisper of the axe

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Inspired by someone on my flist exercising caution based on experience and thus not dying in a horrible car wreck]

The closest I've ever come to just being flat-out no take-backs killed involved the route I took home from grade one. We lived in the tutor's residences on Columbia Street. My school was five or six blocks away up Columbia [1] and there were train tracks about a third of the way from home to school. One day I was walking home, tripped just short of the tracks and as I stood back up, a train came through. I could have covered the distance between me and the tracks in the time it took me to get up.



1: Or much longer via a "short cut" I discovered, which looped all around UW campus and took me by the Tuck Shop in V1 (which was only useful if I'd remembered to hide my money: the teacher used to confiscate any loose change the kids had for some charity or other].

Comments

[kuangning]

That's *awesome.* I wish my parents had been that logical; we, as children of traditional West Indian parents, got raised on the "because I said so" and "if you don't stop crying I'll give you something to cry for" model of child-rearing.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Bill also did that all the time. It depended on how much reaction time you gave him when confronting him with a new idea.