Executive Summary: "You never know!" 

Long Version: My friend had purchased a leaf vacuum on ebay. The seller's directions were excellent and the vacuum was nearly new and lighter than we expected.

With the vacuum in the back seat, we were headed home, hoping to stop at a favourite restaurant on the way. (Later we got there and found it had turned into an Outback Steak House - and since it's just insane to eat at an Outback when you're actually IN Australia we ate at the Hungry Jack's next door. But I digress.)

So: we had our seat belts on, and because we were navigating the radio was off, and we were sailing into Wollongong on a four lane road (two lanes each way). I was in the slow (or "kerb") lane, and in front of me a car did something weird, zipping quickly into the fast (or "passing") lane in a way that looked dangerous. Then I saw WHY the car had done that: there was a car parked in the kerb lane and everyone in that lane (who had been zipping along through the countryside at about 80 kph) had to move into the passing lane rather suddenly. Since the passing lane was full of traffic moving quickly, I decided to come to a dead (unfortunate choice of adjective) stop behind the parked car and wait for a suitable opening.

Later, on the way home (is this calming? - for the second time I have deliberately mentioned "afterwards"), my friend (who is also the car's owner and my fiercest driving critic, within the context that she is grateful for my driving no matter what because although she has a car she has never had a license) said that I should have been looking ahead farther and that I too often get "stuck" behind parked cars in the kerb lane. When  she said this, as soon as traffic permitted (because we were then stuck in the passing lane behind someone turning right) I gave her one of my wrinkly angry faces and she admitted that on most of the roads we travel there is no "perfect" lane - "It's not like in America where everything's a superhighway with no stops. In the left lane you have parked cars and in the right lane you have people turning right..." May I say that we are staunch supporters of public transit and one of my cousins is a bus driver in LA and I prefer a professional driver every time. But I digress again.

So, as our car was stationary, I was looking behind to see how soon I could signal and pull out, and I saw a silver car coming towards us, in our lane, really fast. I distinctly remember three things:

1. I thought to myself, "I don't think he sees us."
2. I turned to my friend and said, "We're going to be hit." With a touching tone of I'm still totally on top of things, like I always am, just letting you know. Which was nuts because being on top of things, or in control, is always an illusion, although for some people it takes a car accident to underscore the point.
3. There was no time to do anything else, and my life absolutely did not flash before my eyes, because everything happened very very fast.

He hit us and knocked us forward (although thankfully not far enough forward to hit the parked car, partly because our car is mid-sized, and  we ourselves also provide lots of ballast, and because we have terrific new tires, and because I had left plenty of room in front of the car) and bounced us around, but we were ok.

Even more fortunately, the six (or seven? seemed like a lot, and they kept moving so I didn't actually count them) young men in the car behind were okay too, although even more shaken up than we were. My friend said later that when she got out of the car wobbling a bit and leaning on her stick, they looked upset, worrying that they'd caused her to limp. But the limp is pre-existing. She is great in a crisis and l let her call the police while I took the other driver's details. Since the guys were clearly in shock I wanted to give them our big spare water bottle and a bag of jelly snakes (sugar is good for shock) but my friend asked me not to because it would look "weird". Their rented silver car had so much damage to the front that it was undrivable (radiator water spewing all over), and there were lots of mutual recrimination faces in the other party - whether because of the delay, or because the police took their names and they would have preferred this not happen, or because some of them felt guilty because they had been distracting the driver, I never found out. (I believe the statistic I read recently, that the #1 cause of accidents is driver distraction - including but not limited to use of mobile phones and texting, looking at cute outfits on the sidewalk is just as deadly, and since I'm prone to this I have been working on it. Anyway, people reading this, don't distract the driver! Wait until you get home!)

A nice fireman/paramedic named Tony assessed whether I was OK, and my friend said I gave him too much info (although TMI are my middle initials and she knows that) and a nice policeman breathalyzed me (flying colours! hadn't had a drink since I arrived in Australia on Tuesday) and told us that since there were a lot of crazies on the roads on Sundays he might not be able to get an event number off the computer system until later (although in fact he expedited things for us and by the time we got home he had left the number on our message machine), and then some other nice firies (pronounced fire-ees: what Aussies call firemen) over-did their Aussie accents in a sort of Crocodile Dundee way. "To impress your Yank friend," one of them said, flirting with my friend, as she is gorgeous, with golden hair and a sweet approachable face (so much so that people often fail to notice the limp and the stick and don't even think to offer her a chair).

I think I have forgotten to mention that the back of our car was totally smashed in. The policemen and firemen checked the car thoroughly though, and made sure the exhaust wasn't coming through the boot (=trunk), and tied down the crumpled boot lid, trapping therein not only my friend's trusty wheelchair (why she needs a mid-sized car) but also a box of White Wings brownie mix that I had bought for my friend's daughter, and my friend is now jumping through all the necessary hoops for the insurance to get it fixed, but it will be a pain, right up there with the time the transmission fell over in Buladelah on our way to Queensland. Car problems always seem to happen right before my friend is scheduled to teach a class for which lots of people have already paid.

The one other interesting thing that happeed, is that clearly some gentlemen with a tow truck company were listening to the police radio, because they showed up even before the firies, and tried to intimidate us into letting them tow us, but we didn't go for it. They might have succeeded with the other guys, but we just wanted to get home (and I wanted to have a lie down and shudder), so once the police and firies gave us the go-ahead, we pulled out into traffic, very carefully.

When I think of all the stupid things I have ever done in an automobile, it seems funny that THIS is the one that might have got me. I'm so glad it didn't. And very very grateful. I am contemplating a variety of gratitude rituals (in addition to writing this note) and if any of them are particularly exciting I'll post them here.

PS - For a bit of superCONTEXT: the bushfires in Victoria (the state to the south of us) are now officially the worst disaster in Australian history, and so our fender-bender doesn't amount to a hill of beans compared to the deaths and the homeless families and entire towns wiped out, and even though I'm only an adopted Aussie I was very VERY proud of our Deputy Prime Miinister, Julia Gillard, who sounded exactly the right notes when I heard her just now on BBC Radio. Speaking of fire-fighters (including my bus driving cousin's son in LA and all of his new rellies by marriage), both professional and volunteer, our thoughts are with you all.