When his truck finally pulled into the parking lot where I was calling his name into the phone, he got out, walked crookedly to my car, and said, “I think I just had a wreck.” His face was bruised and lumpy, he seemed disoriented, his truck was dented all over, and his exhaust pipe was dragging the ground. He had a headache and couldn't remember what happened--but when we retraced it a few days later, it was amazing that he had survived.
In the next hours, he calculated the cost of repairs (extensive) and refused to go to the doctor insisting that he'd be okay. In those same hours, I thought of all the different moves I might have made that day that could have prevented this disaster. "I should have stopped and spent the night and waited until daylight to come," I said. "I shouldn't have come." And: "Imagine what could have happened! You could be dead!"
Today I heard an interesting segment on Ted Talks (NPR) about the subjunctive mood in English grammar, verbs like "should have" or "would have." Not all languages have this. Because we do, we can talk about what might have happened, could have happened. We can regret what we did and we can imagine what we could do, might do, in the future.
Because of the subjunctive mood, we can muse about other possible outcomes: what would have happened if I'd made a different choice; what could have happened if his truck had gone ten more feet and hit the guardrail and gone into the deep ravine; what we might do differently next time.
But Mike--perpetually optimistic--refuses to "play the what if game." He had driven those twenty miles to keep me from having an accident, and the black ice played its trick on his truck instead of Little Blue. He considers us lucky. Period.
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