“He promises to take me soon;
Soon, but not yet.”
– Brady Frost

About eleven years ago, while I built my personal client list in any available waking hours, my day job was as a photographer for a national school portraiture outfit. Often it required a good deal of time on the road and involved hauling several hundred pounds of heavy duty, industrial grade photographic gear in the back of what passed for a trunk in my beloved, red, V8, 1992 Camaro. On one evening, traveling down a route I was unacquainted with, I had the misfortune of coming upon a winding stretch of road I now know is nicknamed locally “Three Cats.”

It’s a tricky enough piece of pavement to navigate at 55 mph during the bright light of day, but I was introduced to it on a preternaturally dark night shrouded in fog while the area was also suffering a brief power failure that sapped the street lights at precisely the most dangerous switchback in Three Cats at precisely the moment I entered. It is so hazardous even in the day because there’s an intersection right there at the beginning of it, and a break in the median strip, and six feet deep ditches on either side of the road.

I missed the first turn. I remember how I slowed and leaned forward to squint a better view and how the fog and darkness and unfamiliarity of the road led me to believe I had a bit farther to go. I remember catching a glimpse of the median strip in the side of my right eye as I whipped past. I remember feeling my Camaro dip forward, and seeing the wall of grass rise in front of me lit only by my headlights.

I blinked. In that time my seatbelt tightened, my airbag deployed and broke right thumb, and those several hundred pounds of equipment protected in heavy plastic cases all came flying forward into the front of the vehicle at whatever speed the car had been traveling before it crumpled into the far side of the ditch. And all that gear, somehow, missed slamming my seat forward and breaking my neck against the steering wheel.

There’s more to that story – I was trapped in the vehicle as a fire became imminent – but to go farther, I think, would stretch anyone’s ability to continue believing the rest of what I have to say.

I’d become used to being Teflon. It wasn’t just the sense of immortality with which the young are blessed. Nothing stayed with me. For a few years plagued with hay fever so severe that I resembled Mr. Magoo twice a year, even that one day went away entirely of its own volition despite all the medical manuals that declare such an event is practically impossible. As I, for an instant, saw the side of that ditch balling up the front of my Camaro like so much paper, it never occurred to me that I might die. I was instead searching for the right gear to propel me out of disaster.

Just under two weeks ago, my heart fluttered… and wouldn’t stop. I went to a neighborhood medical shop to get checked out. They were moderately concerned, prescribed what was likely the appropriate medication and sent me on my way.

A week later the throbbing and fluttering had only taken brief vacations. I went back to the shop, they increased my dosage, but advised I go to the nearest Emergency Room. I resisted for roughly 24 hours.

By the time I finally surrendered myself I’d learned all too much about the irreparable damage that can be done to a heart by seemingly minor incidents. I knew far too much about how my lifelong reckless behavior could make a flame burn half as long. By all rights, I knew full well, it was time that I start paying for driving city streets at 70 mph and smoking like Tony Bourdain. Eating jalapenos whole and swigging flaming shots, once fabulous old party tricks, now took on a cumulative severity I never had imagined. Taking pride in such stupidity as standing on forklifts at full extension and climbing to the tops of cranes and avoiding falling from cliffs by the skin of my teeth all for the sake of a “cool” shot became evidence in the case that I’d spent all the life that was fairly mine.

Less than 24 hours later it was done and determined. For all practical purposes I have a heart like a horse. New Orleans might have been saved had they my heart as a drainage pump. My thoroughly convincing, pre-myocardial infarction symptoms were due to a pair of rather benign disorders that stand a good chance of passing into memory.

But this time, this time out of a hundred others, I am not again Superman. This time I know that my incredible fortune can not go on. It must end one way or another.

I’m an atheist and devoutly so if that’s logically possible. But I find it hard to debate something said to me after I slammed face first at 50 mph into that ditch. “You’re here for something, Miko. You’ve just got to figure out what it is.”

It appears to me that car crash was Strike One. It appears to me as well that my crisis these past few days was probably Strike Two. I doubt that I can avoid Strike Three. When it comes it will. I can dodge it no more than I could have dodged a bullet from the Beltway Snipers when they were thought to be on my doorstep. I can only pursue my talent – and what some would call my calling – until I accomplish whatever it is I am here to do.