(If I Only) Had A Brain

I have always said that the driver of the car that hit me must not have turned on her lights, or she would have seen me against the background of fresh snowfall from the night before. Today, as I walked toward Penn, I approached a cross street. I’ll try to diagram the situation:

The car caught my attention, although since it was turning it would not affect the path I planned to take. Although the sun was out, low in the sky, it had rained earlier. The car still had its lights on. I looked directly at the car. The driver was turning widely so that the car was at a direct angle headed for me.

For a deer-like moment I stood transfixed. The turning car slowed a bit, and the lights shone directly, squarely, in my face. The explosion of fear that I felt then had nothing to do with the current situation. It came from another time and another place, when the lights of a car had headed straight for me without stopping, when I could not possibly move fast enough to get out of the way, when the driver just did not stop or turn aside.

“Marty” - the nickname my mother chose - is now my way of introducing her as a real person. She did not always resemble the ogre who will show up in the Salt Lake City post-accident narrative.

As I grew up in the standard nuclear family, with an absentee commuting father, and a more-or-less housewife mother, she taught me. She taught me what she knew of the scholarship on biblical literature; she taught me what she knew of politics, as a keen reader of the daily New York Herald Tribune, and also of Newsday. She took me to libraries–both in Connecticut, before I was nine, and on Long Island, later. She evinced determination that my mind would not be wasted, as she considered hers had been.

When I was eleven and my brother was nine, she enrolled in an algebra course at a Community College, aiming to complete her college degree, cut short by the Depression. She also loved math, and had gotten three 100% grades in the New York State Regents Exams in High School math.

My brother got nephritis, which threatened his life and required constant care. She didn’t finish the algebra course. Another time she tried to go back to school and another one of the three of us–I have a sister five years younger–got sick. Also, at the same time my brother had nephritis, I had mumps, which traveled to my left ear and destroyed the nerve. I don’t know which she felt; guilt and resentment because of the demands of her children, or frustration and anger at not being able to complete her degree. Both, I think.

She taught me Greek letters, and helped me with Latin homework when I was in High School. She taught me to notice the differences in the bible texts I brought home from Sunday School, and taught me the — Hypothesis, that texts were often detectably composite. She loved mystery stories; Agatha Christie and her detective Hercule Poirot presented her with puzzles she often solved. We did get the Sunday New York Times, and she did the crossword in ink–occasionally with words crossed out, but not too often. Beyond that, she drove each of us to lessons and doctor visits every week; when I needed–as then current thinking went–to have nasal polyps shrunk to prevent any more ear-nose-throat infections that would threaten my hearing, she drove me across the county to the hospital where a radiologist could apply treatments.

Every once in awhile I would discover her scrubbing the kitchen floor on her hands and knees. At one point she told me the reason for that behavior. “I won’t leave your father with a dirty house.” She didn’t add, “on top of the three kids.”

My father had died in 1971, before he was fifty, of heart disease. That left her bereft, I later learned. She tended to construct narratives, quite imaginative narratives, after the fact. I think that in her mind, after my father died, theirs was one of the great loves of the century. Mourning that great love sufficed to allow her to drink rather more than less, for a number of years.

Before The Accident she had begun to travel–to see the mountains of the Canadian Northwest, and British Columbia. To visit my brother, who then as now lived in Australia. I think the Alzheimer’s and later death of her sister Edie may have been the wake-up call. To stop drinking. To stop hoarding her legacy from my father. Not to stop mourning him, in truth or fantasy, but at least to live out that fantasy love.

By living out that fantasy love, I mean this. Marty, my mother, often told us stories of their courtship and marriage. One of the stories, told particularly to me, was that after they married, in 1937, they both worked. They dreamed of travel. Then in 1939 Hitler invaded Poland; they knew that war in Europe was inevitable, and that travel would be impossible for some time. So they decided to have children–as a way of fighting Hitler? as an expression of hope against disaster? I don’t know; for whatever reason babies came into existence during the war years and immediately afterwards.

In any case, nine months after Hitler invaded Poland, I was born. My birth coincided with the Fall of Paris in June.

My father worked at jobs he increasingly did not like, in positions of responsibility in aerospace engineering research and development. He loved planes; he loved to fly.

His father, a furniture maker and woodworker, had helped Sikorsky by making mockups or models of helicopters during World War I. During World War II my father worked with Sikorsky in designing helicopters and putting into them into production, in Slidell, Louisiana–just across Lake Ponchartrain from New Orleans. We lived there just a year, though–probably there is little record of his contribution. My mother really really hated New Orleans. She had two children under three, the climate was damp and buggy, and it was hot. Demand for aircraft engineers peaked during this period, so my mother’s difficulties with New Orleans meant that we could easily move North again, which we did, within a year. [I think he then worked at Hamilton Standard Propellers for a while.]

Beyond that time period, when he had begun to work in Mt. Vernon, New York, and we lived on Long Island, a very long commute, we ate family dinners every night when he got home. He would often pose an imaginary problem, or describe a bit of science. Sometimes he told us about meeting Chuck Yeager at Wright Field in Ohio, where he traveled to supervise the testing of a plane — or a titanium wing — he and his team had designed. That led to a story about the breaking of the sound barrier, which made seeing the film of that name all the more exciting.

In particular, he described going to the University of Pennsylvania to see [name] the first computer. That machine enchanted him, we could tell. We found it exciting to hear him tell about counting in binary numbers; he taught us how that worked. I mastered binary numbers, but hex, the system of encoding computer instructions in a base-twelve number system, eluded me. He told us “Someday these `computers’ will design airplanes, and make my job obsolete.” He sounded happy about that.

Both my mother and father beamed with pride when I got the Science prize at Eighth Grade Graduation. Shortly after that, my father took me aside and said. “You should probably go to college, withyour interests. I think you should; but there’s only enough money to send either you or David to college. Because he’s the man, and will have to make a living, we’ll have to send him. You make good grades. You could get a scholarship, and then you could go.” This sort of thing I kept in my heart, until the Women’s Liberation Movement set it free.

Yes, I did get a scholarship, and went to a top-flight women’s college that was completely wrong for me–but, paradoxically, one that my father thought I should attend. While there, the early training in bible led me to take a two-semester course in bible. I discovered the Song of Deborah, on the occasion of a professor’s lecture. It was the college of the “uncommon woman,” and Deborah was one of the few uncommon women of the bible. I wrote a term paper, and researched it over the Christmas holiday by commuting every day to the New York Public Library, the 42d street branch, the one with the lions. I researched the paper in the Judaica room of the library–that was where the call system delivered the books that I wanted. Years later, I told the story to Harris Lenowitz, my Hebrew/Semitic languages professor, and he said “With all those Hasids?” It is true; the Judaica room consisted of a population of scholars that was heavily Hasidic, with sidecurls and broadbrimmed (Borsalinos, I later learned) hats. Later reading Chaim Potok’s novels brought that experience to life once more. To an 18-year-old from Long Island, they were exotic, and knew the language of Deborah, which I did not.

At that point I knew: what I wanted to do with my life was to learn the language of Deborah and translate her poem, the oldest material in the Hebrew bible–the first woman, so to speak. And certainly the first woman who did speak.

I didn’t make it at that college; the second year I kept complaining to the student health service that my right flank hurt. They kept not doing anything, and apparently wrote in my record that I was suffering from a psychosomatic illness. I then felt worse and worse, and also got crazier and crazier, until I couldn’t do my course work. At the end of the fourth semester, they didn’t want me back. Three weeks later I was in the hospital having an operation on my right kidney that followed by a day the diagnostic procedure that should have been done a year earlier. I had a greatly enlarged kidney due to a blocked ureter. As one doctor later commented “All that — , no wonder you were crazy.” Not to mention having been told “There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s all in your head. Your right flank doesn’t really hurt, of course.”

Of course eventually I finished college somewhere else. And of course I never had the prerequisite respect for administrative authority at a college. Now I knew that they did not know what’s best. That has made for a bumpy course, of course.

[flowering trees a substitute for mountains: flowering almond in Jerusalem – in winter, flowering almond along Locust walk in the peculiar winter of 2006. Flowering apricot in Salt Lake City, flowering apricot all up Locust walk in my neighborhood, and around CVS.—at significant times, Pesach getting out of Holy Cross, and return of spring/pesach in Philadelphia. I don’t remember flowering apricot trees, specifically, in Jerusalem—by mid March everything was in flower. The same for Los Angeles.

Like Heidi in the city, for the next four months after the accident, I was without mountains. Unlike Heidi, I did not sleepwalk to go looking for them.

Intensive Care

Once I had waked from my comatose state, I started to object to the care I received at LDS Hospital, object angrily, in fact. I did not have a personal doctor at the time; and even if I had had one, she or he would probably not have had privileges at LDS Hospital. It was and is an excellent hospital. Like other LDS efforts in the area of care giving, whether social services or medical services, the mantra which governed the establishment was “We take care of our own.” The corollary to that often seemed to be “We do not take care of anyone else.” If “our own” included gays, they tended to be “anyone else,” anyway.

I think I knew that Ben and his partner came almost daily to the waiting area for intensive care, partly to look after Alyssa, my 19-year-old daughter. Ben had children of his own, and perhaps other experiences, that prompted him to do this. Then, too, we had actually won the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation competition, partly due to my writing. In lieu of Utah State Department of Health funds, or any pass through by the State DOH of federal Aids/HIV prevention funds, the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation grant constituted almost all the funding available for AIDS/HIV prevention.

Like Heidi in the city with Clara, the care I got at LDS Hospital was professional, nevertheless. I would never have survived, otherwise. The Accident occurred on Thursday, January 12th; I “woke up” from the coma on Monday, January 16th, which was the Inauguration Day for George Bush the elder. The Inauguration ceremonies were — fairly loudly — broadcast in the ICU. Later that day or evening — I couldn’t see the mountains and I couldn’t tell what time it was — one of the doctors assigned to my care came by, and started asking me the standard Mental Status questions.

“Did I know my name?” Yes, and this time it seemed to belong to me. There wasn’t anyone I knew who had come to my bedside and called me “Sigrid,” but I think that the ICU nurses kept calling me that. It seemed to fit, more and more.

“Did I know where I was?” Yes, and I was angry about it. I’m in LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, and I want to be in Holy Cross Hospital. Please take me there.

“Did I know what year it was?” Well, the Inauguration Day coverage had repeated that a few times, and so I was fairly certain that it was 1989.

“Did I know who was President of the United States?” (I wonder what this question is in Iraq!) Yes, that was easy. By now, in the evening, it was George Bush. So the MD got a bit creative and asked me “Who was President before him?” That wasn’t too hard, because Ronald Reagan had been at the Inauguration ceremony.

After the doctor left, Alyssa came in, and we talked a bit.

“Mommy, I’m so glad you have surfaced!”

“Tell me what happened to you. How did you get here? Who is taking care of you?”

She told me that Ben and his partner were always there in the waiting room, and they took her back to the apartment a couple of times a day to feed the cats and change her clothes. She also said that my mother was going to come in the next day, from Massachusetts. I think members of Havurah B’Yachad were going to take her out to the Airport to pick up my mother, and she and my mother would stay at the apartment.

The day after that, I believe, I had the operation to knit my knee together again. The orthopedic surgeon was, I believe, the only doctor from LDS Hospital whom I continued to see after I changed hospitals. Just when the pain was getting less intense, here was some more pain. The problem was that I am allergic to codeine and morphine in natural forms. All digestive activity stops, and I start vomiting. No wonder I was angry with the doctors, for giving me painkillers that made me vomit. Stupid doctors.

By then, the doctors and nurses were really tired of me, I think. They began promising that if I would just be good, I could go to another hospital. So I was good, and they moved me to the next level ward, and Ben and his partner came in.

“We got the grant,” Ben reminded me because I couldn’t remember; “It’s going to be paid out in the next few days” Ben told me. The budget for Salt Lake AIDS Foundation in the proposal called for a full-time Director of Development, a job which would be advertised as soon as the funds were available, and for which Ben had encouraged me to apply.

Things to be angry about: Doctors and nurses who didn’t call me “Dr. Peterson.” Granted, in the first few days, the comatose days, it helped me to own my own name, that they called me “Sigrid.” But when they tried “Mrs. Peterson,” I got mad. “It’s not Mrs. Peterson, it’s Doctor Peterson.

I barely had time to have the knee operation, on about January 16th, when it was time for Alyssa to go back to school. Only a few days before, I had nearly died, and she had kept me alive by talking about the beautiful moments in my life, as I had recollected them to her. Now it was time for her to leave.

A few days before that, when I was in the ER, she had raced after one of the ER doctors who was asking her about medical history, and then was taking me for an x-ray, to tell him “She is allergic to the dye injection for an Intravenous Pyelogram (IVP).” “What happens then?” the doctor asked. “She died, or almost died,” Alyssa replied. “When was that?” asked the doctor. “When she was eighteen,” Alyssa knew. The doctor explained that they had changed the IVP dye formula, and he thought it would be safe. They had to do the x-ray
to know whether I had internal injuries, especially to my kidneys. “We don’t have time to do a 24-hour prep so she’s prepared to resist the dye injection, but now that we know, we will have the antidote on hand, just in case.”

This was so hard, to send her away; she had now saved my life at least twice. But my training as a psychologist was kicking in, and I knew that hanging around the hospital for the next four months, hanging around to learn of my ups and downs, would stop her development as a young adult. She had been away at college for only the first semester, and it would be hard to go back when her mother was still in the hospital. I hoped she would tell a few friends what had happened, and get some help there. I think, instead, that she was pretty much bereft, in a couple of ways. She didn’t know, any more, what exactly was going on with me. She didn’t get the reinforcement she had had for helping the doctors know what was going on with me. She didn’t get to plead with me to live, or to be nice, or not to be mad. So going back to Grinnell, in Central Iowa, was not a terrific choice. I still think it was a bit better, given the alternatives, than staying in Salt Lake City.

After that, I had my mother to cope with. She cared, and she was devastated. I hadn’t known, I don’t think, how proud she was of my Ph.D. I had just thought she was annoyed that I was a psychologist, because the one psychologist she had known had traumatized her. What she did with her devastation was to decide that Alyssa and I could not live in our apartment with its beautiful view of the mountains, which somehow scandalized her. Certainly, she thought, I would never be able to climb the stairs up to the apartment. So she closed it down, with the help of the Mitzvah Committee of Congregation Kol Ami.

Now I had no mountains, no home, and no daughter. Only a mother.

There is a picture I can see in my mind. I am in a wheelchair, and two men are walking with me. Well, one is pushing my chair, and the other is walking. We are viewing panels from the AIDS quilt, a memorial to the victims of the disease in those first years, when survival was so variable and so little was known–and so much was feared. One of the men is Ben Barr. The quilt panels are laid out on a gymnasium-type floor–I can see that much in my mind. As we move solemnly among the panels, Ben is telling me “It took a lot of work to organize this. Then at the last minute they wanted to change the dates that it would come to Salt Lake. It’s the first time the quilt has traveled.” In the scene in my mind, I am very passive, even mindless, that meditative “zen mind, no mind,” instead of the everyday anger at everything/everyone around me.

I felt honored. I had let the three-person writing group that got the grant that kept the Salt Lake Aids Coalition going. It seemed to me that the

If the period after The Accident was “In the Rough,” I can term the next period one of smoothing out. It meant gathering together what I had been able to accomplish, learning more about the difficulties ahead, and particularly solving the practical problems of living alone, except for one cat, and the occasional daughter.

In the four months before the accident, I had studied Modern Hebrew. After I and the rest of our committee had finished writing the proposal to the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation for an AIDS/HIV prevention grant, and while we were waiting to hear, we talked about what each of us wanted to do next, given that we were both committed to, and identified with, AIDS/HIV prevention in Utah. Such commitment would mean that we would be unable to obtain jobs in Utah outside of AIDS/HIV prevention. I thought that I wanted to study languages to do research in religion, or religion and psychology. So I enrolled in/sat in on a first-year course in Hebrew at the University of Utah, taught by Yael Maschler, who had just graduated from the University of Michigan Linguistics Program. She also was an Israeli teacher of Hebrew, Ulpan style. One of my classmates was Margaret Toscano, a woman struggling to bring about a fresh understanding of women in the LDS Church. Margaret and I, of a similar age, had similar goals - to research and teach in the field defined by the biblical time period and the Mediterranean region.

April 3rd, 2007
Filling in the Background - Section 3
by Sigrid Peterson in Unedited material, Sectional work
What was my world like, the day that driver failed to clear her windshield on a wintry day, and ploughed right into me?
What comes first? Surroundings? Social Status? Religion — after all, I lived in Salt Lake City, even though I grew up on Long Island in New York State. No, I didn’t belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I never belonged. I would tell anyone from back East who talked about what pests the Mormon missionaries were, “We live in the safest place in the world, in terms of answering the door to Mormon missionaries, and losing an afternoon in fruitless discussion. Mormons don’t send missionaries to Salt Lake City. That would be carrying coals to Newcastle!” Actually, sometime after my accident in 1989, the LDS Church did start sending missionaries out to proselytize in Salt Lake City, Utah, the home of the first Mormon Temple.
I had lived in Salt Lake City for fifteen years before anyone who of Mormon heritage asked me to visit him and his wife in their home. That was Reed Merrill, my first Ph.D. advisor, in the University of Utah School of Education’s Program in Counseling Psycholoy. For most of his life he had been substantially noncompliant with the Mormon Word of Wisdom. He drank and smoked. That was fine with me, of course. He had returned to the Mormon Church–the short name for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints–a couple of years before his death, in approximately 1986.
Reed had died, and I said kaddish for him. The rabbi said, when I asked him if I could, “You can do that if the person has done something nice for a Jew.” That he (Reed Merrill) certainly had, in catching a mislaid admissions file and pushing through my admission to the Graduate Program in Counseling Psychology.. Yet anyone reading this who knew Reed Merrill would say, “Reed must be turning over in his grave. He was a terrible anti-Semite.” I had graduated in 1981, and with the help of a friendly board, and with Reed Merrill as clinical advisor, I had started Bridges Interfaith Counseling Center. Since it would take a year of supervised practice before I could be licensed as a Psychologist–in Utah, Counseling Psychologists and Clinical Psychologists held the same license. They were (are?) both Psychologists. My license number was #430; I’m proud that I still remember it. Now the contents of the licensing exam, which I don’t remember, I walked out of that exam room, in 1982, with the sense that all I knew about psychology had drained out of me.
Changing my faith to Judaism in 1985 lost me support for Bridges, and I turned it over to an able Clinical Social Worker. I continued to practice as a psychologist; one of the side jobs I had had was with Catholic Charities. They had a couple of affiliated psychologists; if I were to identify them by their specialties, I would be saying “the only blank psychologist in Utah.” That doesn’t seem necessary, though.
I also worked at the Utah State Department of Health, writing many of their statistical and policy reports, especially based on Census Data. I had found learning statistics excruciatingly difficult; I persisted, over ten years, and as my first dissertation shows, did master much of the more complicated concepts.
When I first started Bridges, I had two gay clients who each had the goal of changing their sexual behavior toward monogamy. They had in common what seemed to me to be an uncommon fear of death, yet neither of them told me about AIDS. And I hadn’t heard about it.
Later, of course, I figured it out. I watched the statistical rise of cases in Salt Lake City and in Utah, as a statistician in the State Department of Health. That sort of watching was the job of the State Epidemiologist, not a policy statistician, yet I never stopped being interested in AIDS, thinking of my clients and their fear I had never recognized for what it was.
One early spring–I still remember the chill in the air at the mountain resort–the Statewide health organizations held a fair of sorts. For some reason, they invited people from the State Department of Health. In walking around and looking at the tables and exhibits, I saw one table manned by Ben Barr, then the director of Aids Project Utah, an AIDS Prevention Organization. We talked about the problems of preventing AIDS in Utah, and talked about what needed to be done. We both saw the State Epidemiologist as a barrier to AIDS prevention, since his take was that AIDS would run its course among Utah’s very small population of gay men, they would all die off, and the problem would be solved. He was later to say this or similar words in a legislative hearing discussing AIDS legislation, so although it seems a harsh attribution on my part, I believe I am accurately representing his views at the time. Ben Barr and I agreed that because of the stigma against gays in Utah, and the pressure in the Mormon Church for young people to marry young, many gay men resisted the discovery of their sexual identity, and once sexually active would have intercourse with both men and women. I knew this from clinical practice; Ben knew this from his work with people with AIDS, and with AIDS prevention primarily among gay men. We mutually deplored the views of the State Epidemiologist. Then, too, we agreed that prevailing fears and prejudices made the task of AIDS prevention especially difficult in socially conservative Utah. By the end of that day, Ben Barr had enlisted me in the battle to prevent HIV/AIDS in Utah.
We had more conversations, of course. I remember that at that first meeting we discovered we both were Jewish; Ben mentioned that he had even celebrated Passover with friends, not family, in Weber City, lying on the floor resting on pillows.
—
Early in the 1980s my daughter and I moved into an apartment in a wonderful old polygamist house. We lived in half of the second floor; the living room looked out toward the Eastern Mountains, brilliantly visible in winter, pleasantly obscured by a huge hazelnut tree in the front yard. The window was not one window, but five, taking up each of five panels of an octagonal tower in the southeast corner of the house. We did need, or thought we needed, curtains–at least in winter. I hunted stores for the right kind of cloth that would fit the antique appearance of the house, and found a pattern we both loved. What remains of that lovely place to live? What happened to that patterned cloth for curtains? It fits into my story later.
INTERLUDE - Mountains
In every chapter so far, the mountains have intruded. I have and will describe every scene as indoors, or oriented in some way to the mountains. When I remember my favorite places, I remember the view of the eastern, southern, or western mountains from that place. The annual oppression of smog, that would hang thickly over the valley from sometime in December to sometime in February, depressed us because the smog robbed us of the mountains.
Later, when I was about to leave Salt Lake City, I would travel around the city to the places with the best views, to drink in, inhale, the mountains and hold them, somehow, in my vision. Growing up in the east, we had had mountains, we thought. My mother told of horseback trips through the Berkshires; we spent time at her family’s cabin in Northfield, Massachusetts, beautifully set on a ridge overlooking the Connecticut River Valley. We set out for a family excusion one summer day in a foggy drizzle that my mother called “river mist”–which turned into rain and stayed as rain.That is how we saw the White Mountains of New Hampshire, drowned in rain.
In Utah, in contrast, the mountains looked like some giant had spilled her picture postcards across the landscape. Like picture postcards, they always faced the sun, or perhaps the moon. My ex-husband and I, in the summer after arriving in Salt Lake City for graduate school, planned a hike with the baby. The year before, on Long Island, it had rained every weekend we went camping, to practice for carcamping across the country. Here in Utah, he asked me, “Did you check the weather report?” “Of course not,” I said. “The weather is always the same, sunny and dry.” He agreed, “What a difference from last year!”

Smoothing Out - Section 4

If the period after The Accident was “In the Rough,” I can term the next period one of smoothing out. It meant gathering together what I had been able to accomplish, learning more about the difficulties ahead, and particularly solving the practical problems of living alone, except for one cat, and the occasional daughter.
In the four months before the accident, I had studied Modern Hebrew. After I and the rest of our committee had finished writing the proposal to the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation for an AIDS/HIV prevention grant, and while we were waiting to hear, we talked about what each of us wanted to do next, given that we were both committed to, and identified with, AIDS/HIV prevention in Utah. Such commitment would mean that we would be unable to obtain jobs in Utah outside of AIDS/HIV prevention. I thought that I wanted to study languages to do research in religion, or religion and psychology. So I enrolled in/sat in on a first-year course in Hebrew at the University of Utah, taught by Yael Maschler, who had just graduated from the University of Michigan Linguistics Program. She also was an Israeli teacher of Hebrew, Ulpan style. One of my classmates was Margaret Toscano, a woman struggling to bring about a fresh understanding of women in the LDS Church. Margaret and I, of a similar age, had similar goals - to research and teach in the field defined by the biblical time period and the Mediterranean region.

How do you know when you have recovered from traumatic brain injury? When you go back to work at your old job? When you learn a new task and perform it better
than most?

Is there a way to measure learning to walk again?

I think the clearest way to self-knowledge in recovery is setting a goal and achieving it. I had to learn to walk again. The first goal was to take four steps between parallel bars, with someone in front of me and someone behind me. That is still one of the most difficult physical efforts I have ever made. Helped by the rehabilitation center staff, even, and still the most difficult physical effort.

The most difficult psychological effort, in contrast, came when I was alone, when the rehab staff was not present, when the rehab staff had not even anticipated the difficulty and planned for it.

I had been hit by a car while crossing the street at a crosswalk. Others think I’m strange or silly because I repeat that “at a crosswalk” every time I mention the accident, even to someone who knows that’s how it happened.

Why repeat something that everyone knows?

I had to learn to cross the street all over again. If a car clipped the corner or eased through a stop sign, I would start yelling at the driver. Often I said, “Pay your insurance.”

Maybe some background would help make sense of this.=

The place I found to live–oh, that’s another story–had a beautiful location just south of the drive that took one up into the mountains surrounding Salt Lake City. My apartment was on a top floor with a balcony and a spectacular view of the Salt Lake Valley, ringed by mountains, reaching out to Great Salt Lake and Antelope Island. If only I never had to go down to the street, never had to get anywhere, never had to watch the drivers ignore the stoplights and speed through the intersection, never had to cross the intersection, I would be fine.

“The brain-injured person has an exaggerated need for certainty, safety, definiteness, and order.” Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality from memory, at this point.