In 1997 I as living in the tiny little fishing village of Wickford, RI. We had a nice house on the waterfront, a huge backyard, a dock, and neighbors across the harbor who had a couple of peahens that would sometimes come to our yard and scare our cat. It was here where I got into my first (and only) car accident, two miles from my house.

At the time I was working for a small ISP that was located next to the campus at URI. We had a few thousand customers but were growing steadily due to the annoyingly catchy commercial jingle. It was a small crew where almost everyone in the place was known by what they had as their email address with the company, and in fact I was specifically told to pick an email address that I wouldn’t be embarrassed about should someone start yelling it across the office. The commute wasn’t very long on most days, as long as it wasn’t a beach day, and if it was a beach day it wasn’t all that difficult to take the back roads.

I was driving into work one morning when it happened. I was slowing down for a stop light, only I wasn’t slowing down as quickly as the bus in front of me was. The bus came to a complete stop when I was still going about 15mph, which was enough to completely wreck the plastic grill with the fake chrome on my car but not fast enough to do anything to the bus.

Had I hit anything else on the road that morning, we probably would have just laughed and gone our separate ways. However, I had to hit the mother of all embarrassing vehicles to collide with, hitting one of Rhode Island’s buses transporting a full load of people to the adult day car. A full load of mentally handicapped adults. The driver has to report this one, calling the police before she even gets out of the bus. I’m picking up the pieces of my grill from the street when the squad car shows up in record time, probably because this is the singlemost exciting thing to happen since they took the town drunk’s bicycle away because he was too drunk to ride it home. The bus driver gets out, and the cop asks her, “Everyone ok in there?”

“Yeah, they all say they’re fine,” she replies. “That is, except for one of them, but he doesn’t talk anyway.”

Even 10 years later, anytime someone talks about car accidents they’ve been involved in, if one of my family members is around someone will inevitably pipe up with “Hey Crystal, remember when you hit the short bus?”

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