Everybody has instances in their lives which are particularly memorable. I remember mine because I was there at the time.

Now that I think of it, the string of these particular instances is connected by the Freeway itself.

It’s a chain of events, all related to me, horror stories that stop short of being final because I’m here to tell the tale.

In no particular order except for a sense of chronology, I excavate my memory.

I remember when I was still in high school, just learning to drive, before I had my license. I was a year later than my classmates who all had licenses and were driving around all over the place. It was no hurry for me, because I didn’t have a car, and anyway driving cost money however you figure it, for gas, insurance, incidentals, and I never had any money, so I postponed the inevitable.

I had taken Driver’s Ed in high school where they take you to a parking lot, first at the school, then at the Santa Anita Racetrack which had a BIG parking lot and you could really drive around and learn to turn right and left, and back up, and park parallel.

I had taken the DMV written test to get my learner’s permit which would allow me to drive with a licensed adult in the passenger seat.
It was a family event. “Gary’s taking us for a drive.”

My Father was in the front passenger seat on my right. He had been driving for years and was an intelligent driver, fully licensed.

In the back seat was my Mother, cheering me on. Next to her was my girl friend at the time. She seemed devoted to me, enthusiastic that I was finally going to get my license so I could take her places, something she knew more about than I did as she controlled patience with the prospect that finally I was catching up.

We were driving through the back hills of Monterey Park, all rolling country, on a road I didn’t even know was there. We were all singing loudly together some song we all knew, and I rounded the bend and came out onto the flat that stretched before us.

Several things hit me at once. One was a stop sign unobtrusively to the right. Another was the large avenue cross road almost like a freeway that appeared from nowhere.

The third thing to hit me was a very big truck barreling along from right to left as I slammed on the brakes.

Actually the truck didn’t hit me, I hit it. The truck was knocked away and we were shunted to the right as the passenger door flew open and my Father fell out on his head.

The Highway Patrol seemed to appear instantly. I’m sure I was in shock. I was worried about my Father whom I loved a lot, who said he was alright as he held his bleeding head.

They took him to the hospital as he kept saying, “I’m alright,” partly to reassure us, partly thinking about the cost of the ambulance with money we didn’t have.

The Highway Patrolman was kind and solicitous, as if he had a son learning to drive. He measured the skid marks and said, “You really tried to stop.” He said with admiration, “You really took out that truck. You broke the rear axle.”

I don’t remember anything else about the incident. I don’t know how we got home. Someone must have given us a ride.

I don’t know where they took my Father. I just know that he came back, with kind words so I wouldn’t be traumatized. I must have been in shock for days and don’t know how long it lasted. I think, in some ways, it never went away.

I don’t know if they postponed my license.

The memories are not so much blurred but non-existent as if they were blocked out at the source. To this day, if I think about it, I shiver.
Then there was this time on the Freeway, I think the 101, when I was driving my Father-in-law’s VW pickup with a small camper shell that he had loaned us. It was like a little bus, sides without windows, no rear view, side mirrors I couldn’t quite juggle or interpret, and I could just manage the city streets. But then somehow I was on the Freeway with Shirley, we were probably hauling something like a sofa, and I had to get across the merging lanes where another Freeway joined and the traffic was thick and fast and I could just see to the right ahead the turn-off for Barham which would get me back on city streets so we could manage to get home. I was trying to see where the cars were coming up on the right, so many lanes to cross, and I think I yelled, “Is anybody behind me? Is it clear to the right?” and we were going to pass the turn-off and wind up in the Valley which I didn’t know about and would surely get lost. And I put on my blinker and eased over into the next lane and then the next and then the next. I didn’t know if I was cutting anybody off, I probably heard cars honking, and somehow we made it to the turn-off just in time and didn’t have to go over the curb and up to the light, and then I pulled over to the side to catch my breath and slow my heart. I knew it was a near-miss. I was terrified because Shirley was there in the passenger’s seat my Father had fallen out of. I thanked and blessed California drivers for being alert and better drivers than I was.

I returned the little truck in one piece, probably didn’t mention my near-miss, and thought several thoughts at once, mostly, “Don’t want to do that again.”

Then there was the time we were coming home late. We were living in Riverside, coming back from L.A. where either Shirley had gone to a ballet lesson, or we had attended a concert, or from a visit with her parents, but it was very late and very dark.

We had taken the turn-off from the Freeway, maybe Archibald, maybe Etiwanda, back in those days the area had not built up yet, and it was just miles of vineyards on both sides, some still growing, some withered and dry from former days, no houses, nobody around, no traffic this late, no lights, and with no moon, just blackness all around. And the car died. I was driving. Sudden panic as the headlights dimmed and died, the engine sputtered and died, and we were alone in the dark, still rolling from momentum, but couldn’t see anything. I thanked the powers that be for making the road straight ahead and I tried to keep the steering wheel steady.

As if by unexpected forethought, I turned off the headlights and the engine started up, sputtering but chugging. I turned on the headlights to verify that we were still on the road, not headed for a ditch. The headlights dimmed and died as the engine followed suit, and I turned off the headlights again and the engine went back to chugging. I thought, “However electricity and batteries work, apparently the engine is generating just enough for the spark plugs to keep firing…” just enough to get us to the lighted cross-street where Mission goes over the bridge into Riverside, and we just barely limped home.
It was a close call, because the utter dark would have swallowed us up. There were no portable phones in those days so we couldn’t call anybody for help. There were no houses we could go up to and knock on the door and wake somebody up.

I tried not to think of people waking up in the morning, driving to work, and passing the car pulled over on the right, the motor dead, with two desiccated bodies in the front seat.

Another shuddery memory.

Then there was the time when I wasn’t there but heard about it.

Shirley had a ballet studio, and one of her students was a true eccentric. Basil Tellou. I don’t know if that was his real name, but that’s the name we knew him by. He had had a limited acting career of minor note. He billed himself as a Bishop of Theosophy. He ran for President as an independent and got into the newspaper. He was flamboyant and wore a cape. The other ballet students got used to him and said, “That’s just Basil.”

He lived in a little trailer in a parking lot, and invited people in for tea. His trailer didn’t have a shower. He wore a lot of cologne. You knew when he was in the vicinity.

He loved ballet, and wanted to meet the male dancers backstage.
He got tickets to a performance in L.A. and invited Shirley. He was driving.

The problem was, beyond the uncertainties of his automobile, he had trouble seeing. He wore dark glasses all the time. It may have been part of his ensemble of the cape and hat and scarf. He looked the type to carry a sword-cane. But driving, he had to ask Shirley about the road ahead.

It was like the comedy skit about the blind taxi driver who asks the passenger, “Is there anybody in front of me?”

It was there and back without incident, and Shirley talked mostly about the ballet performance, probably mentioned how Basil always stayed in the slow right lane.

Then there was this large farm house on Third Street, which we later rented. It was used as the Riverside Free School. Those were the days when being “free” was pretty new. Partly because of Shirley’s involvement with ballet, partly because I was the Assistant Manager of Stage One, the local Foreign Film Art House, partly because we knew a lot of people and were friendly and mostly non-judgmental, the fringe took us in. Not to absorb us, but to co-exist.

There was this one guy. He was one of the prime movers of the Free School. It was very free, lots of guys and girls living together, and talk about drugs that wasn’t just talk. The guy was a self-proclaimed artist and had worked his way up to a show in L.A. I’ve written about him elsewhere in my blog where I discuss art.

He was driving his van on the Freeway into L.A. with a couple of girls who were living at the Free School and fighting over him for attention and he would say, “No need to fight, you’ll all get your chance.” I didn’t see the appeal. Maybe they were zonked and couldn’t see straight.

He had loaded his van with paintings for the show, and the two girls, and Shirley as a friend of the family. I didn’t get to go because I was teaching school.

The van was the kind made notorious by the Beat Generation, with a mattress in the back and an atmosphere so thick it obscured the driver’s view.

They were driving surprisingly carefully in the right lane when a cop pulled them over. They quickly opened the windows to freshen the air.
I only heard the story second hand, so am without the details. I imagined they had been pulled over and stopped because they looked suspicious and fit the profile. I could imagine jail and the fear that I would never see Shirley again. I imagined her pleas going unheeded as she protested truthfully, “Not me. I don’t partake. I’m only along for the ride.”

They all laughed that the reason they were pulled over was because they were going too slow on the Freeway.

A series of near-misses.

And there was that one time on the Freeway when I was teaching school in Corona and car-pooling with another teacher who taught second grade. They were good about pairing up teachers who could car-pool their way to work. My colleague was young and attractive and drove a sports car convertible, top down, and finally told me reluctantly that she had to stop driving me and would find another driver because her boyfriend had seen me and was jealous. She was so sorry, and he didn’t care that I was otherwise happily married and there was nothing going on, but you know how guys are, so I started passengering with another woman driver who taught fourth grade and was taller.

But the first driver with the sports car, one time we were driving to school, this time with the roof up because it was raining, and raining so hard there were flood warnings, and we came to a dip in the road and the water was so deep I had to get out and push, and we got to school and I was soaking wet and all the students were gone, sent home, only a few administrators there and they told us we had to leave immediately because in the next thirty minutes the school would be cut off surrounded by water and the only way out would be by helicopter.
So we turned around and just escaped.

But that wasn’t the near-miss.

It was another time, on the same Freeway, rushing a little because we were just a little late, and there was fog everywhere and all across the freeway so thick as we drove into it that we couldn’t see anything. Except the flashing lights, quick on the brakes, the car swerved and stopped just feet, maybe inches, from another car skewed on the Freeway and had crashed into another car, and in front of that we could just see car after car piled up and flashing lights and tow trucks and police cars.

We said, “Thank God we weren’t on time!” and we backed up to the off ramp and got to school and saw on the news more than a hundred cars in multiple collisions, a record, and we were there, almost.

Near-misses.

Like the time we got our car back from the mechanics at the dealership and Shirley had driven with our child on the Freeway and coming back, she stopped by the dealership and the engine fell down. Yes, down. Clunk. It had not been bolted down when it was released as ready to drive. Shirley said, “We were on the Freeway! We could have been killed!”

The dealership was frightened and gave us a loaner car free while they made sure this time our car was super ready and passed all inspections, twice. They parked it in the lot, waiting its turn for service. Then they told us it would take a little longer because one of their drivers had smashed into our car while doing a test drive on another vehicle, and they had to order replacement parts.

We found another mechanic and never went back to the dealer whose name I won’t mention.

We were seriously looking. But then another bad experience with another bad mechanic. He had come highly recommended by recommendations he may have written himself. He said he was from the Volvo School at the source, where they were so carefully trained that they spent six months learning to change the spark plugs.

We became suspicious when, I won’t mention his name either, he told us to be patient, his mechanics were leaving because he hadn’t paid them and they had taken all his tools, and when he needed a check from us as advance payment and we drove up the street to our bank, he was already there cashing the check.

I guess it’s worth mentioning how we found our wonderful mechanics. J.K. Volvo, Father and son, family owned. Greek. Because Shirley’s Father (technically, Step-Father, but since he had raised her, Father) was a city slicker from Athens and had married her Mother when Shirley was a little girl, so he was the only Father she had known, and taught her about Greece and how the Greeks had started everything like civilization itself, so a Greek mechanic was heaven-sent.

We were driving a Volvo, because, you know, Volvo. This was when the Volvo ads were everywhere as the safest car, and we certainly wanted that for our new family. And Swedes were smart and meticulous, and, in those days, Volvos were still being made in Sweden. So: Greek mechanics working on Swedish Volvos – you couldn’t get any better.
But J.K. Volvo, and how and why. Shirley had just filled the tank at the local gas station, but had overlooked the sign “Diesel” and the car didn’t like it. By the miracle of serendipity, she was towed to J.K. Volvo as the nearest Volvo certified mechanics and the Father, John Kefalas, was kind and fatherly, told her not to worry, he had drained all the fluids and replaced them and the car was running properly and smoothly. They traded stories about Greece and family, and became instant friends. As mechanics in Greece, they had an adjunct machine shop where they could make the parts as necessary. Here, in America, in Pasadena, they also had a machine shop out back, so they were ready for anything.

The son Mike runs the shop with thoughtful competence, cares about his customers, has assembled a proficient crew and an office manager who used to work at the dealership where our car had suffered a collapsed engine and a parking lot smash, so he understood our story from inside experience. We see Mike in the greater community at the Greek Glendi, so we know he’s a real person.

It’s a great relief when you finally find people you can trust.

Not like that first almost parallel experience with our first car, a ’53 blue Chevy, our pride and joy, which a friend had sold us because he could afford an upgrade. We drove that car everywhere, until it finally needed attention, and because we were counting our pennies, and were young and naïve, we let ourselves get talked into allowing the boyfriend of one of Shirley’s close friends, who worked at a garage so he was used to being around the insides of cars and had a kind of garage on his own in his own garage at home and had tools and would fix it up for us, no money. And months went by, and I think we visited our car in his garage with the engine hoisted up, and he was explaining how he was trying to figure out what was wrong so he could learn how to fix it, and we lost any confidence we might have had. And then the tears when we had to say goodbye to our beloved little ’53 blue Chevy.

And then we managed to buy a car, new! An Opel Kadett Station Wagon, because it was highly recommended and had room in the hatch back to carry stuff, and Shirley drove it back and forth from Riverside to her ballet lessons in greater L.A., every day, burning up the freeway until after about 80,000 miles the engine burned out. I’m not sure why, and we went for Volvo, even used, which became our car of choice ever since, even after Ford bought them and makes them in this country, and now China owns Volvo.

But getting back on track to Freeways, and near-misses (how easily I digress and ramble!), there was this other time, not that long ago as the crow flies, when Shirley and I could still walk, and we were driving down to Orange County to see the Kirov Ballet at Segerstrom, doing the iconic La Bayadere with the famous endless entrance of the Shades in the Third Act, and we already had tickets and were getting closer on the 605 South, in the middle lane, when the right front tire loudly blew out and the car slumped to the right and I was just able to get over through the right lane to the off ramp and limping flopping to the street. Again, we could have been killed.

We didn’t have a phone. The Highway Patrol would go right past on the Freeway and never notice us. We were so glad we weren’t killed, and hoped somebody would stop.

I got out and raised the hood and waited. Only a few cars drove by on the lightly traveled side road.

And then one car drove up behind us and stopped and the driver got out.

It was the middle of the afternoon, and he spoke like a good old boy from the South, and said, “I see you had a flat. You coulda been killed. You were damn lucky.”

He was friendly and said, “Let me help you change the tire,” and got out the jack and the spare and swapped the tires, but said, “That spare looks a little low, you’d better drive it a little to test it before you get back on the road. I’ll follow along behind, just in case. I was going to visit my sister but she can wait. Turn right at the corner. I’ll be right behind you. There’s a parking lot for a little mall.”

There was, and he did. We made it to the mall lot, almost on the rim of the wheel because the spare was flat. He said, “I’ll call the Auto Club for you.” And he did.

He went out of his way to be neighborly, because he had the good southern manners of a gentleman and obviously had the same social values we did. He said, “I’ll wait with you to be sure they come and you’ll be alright. I got nothing better to do,” and we talked and were friends.

Shirley and I liked him. He was friendly, a little lonely. He missed his life in the south, was still settling into California. His sister being here helped. He proved there are good people anywhere, and the Auto Club was taking longer because of the weekend, and we decided to wait in a little pub in the mall that he knew from frequent experience, so he must have lived close by. They knew him as a regular.

I bought him a beer, offered money for his help, which though he needed but refused, finally agreed to take a little, and I paid for the beer. I think I ordered him another, and, if I remember rightly, had one myself to join him, partly because I like beer, and because it’s sociable, the right thing to do. Shirley had iced tea. I knew when the tow truck came I wouldn’t be driving, so I enjoyed the beer.
He saw we were alright and safe as we waited for Triple A, and he went on to visit his sister and I think we exchanged phone numbers to “keep in touch.”

A nice, lonely guy, but helpful and caring the way everybody should be, neighborly, democratic.

We waved goodbye.

It was getting later, starting to get dark, and we were hungry.

Shirley stayed by the car and I walked over to a little chicken restaurant in the corner of the lot, enjoyed the warmth and fried chicken smell, and bought some food to take back to Shirley, and we ate it together in the car.

Our good Samaritan friend came back to check on us because he was still in the neighborhood and I said, “We should take you to dinner sometime,” and he said, “That’d be nice.”

The tow truck came, and our friend waited while the driver hooked us up for towing, and he waved goodbye again as he drove away. I think I still have his phone number somewhere.

Shirley and I crowded into the tow truck and the driver was friendly but laconic, and he followed a map on his phone and took us to our house in Altadena and dropped our car in front of our house as we signed the papers and next day got towed to J.K.

The ballet was still running in Orange County, and a few days later we invited our Yugoslavian friends and drove down in their car and got in line for tickets. I showed the box office the tickets I had from the performance we missed, and told them how we were almost killed on the Freeway trying to get there on time, and that’s why we missed the performance.

The woman at the box office window was so sympathetic that she went to her supervisor for a quick conference, and came back and offered us four seats available down front in the orchestra section for $25 each, which would otherwise cost maybe $200 apiece, or more, and our friends were very impressed, and I was too, and they hailed me as a Master Negotiator, and I guess I was.

And the performance was as beautiful as we knew it would be, the endless entry of the sylph shades, one after the other after the other, as iconic as ever. And the stage settings! The way Bolshoi means big and grand and applies to the Kirov too, the way they fill the stage and the audience’s eye, and Dušan said, “Wow! And elephants! Never seen anything like it in my life! And I’ve been around!”

So I was a hero, and that’s a good way to end this little survey of “Near Misses on the Freeway.”