Playing sports has always been a luckless, losing game for me. I was playing golf in a foursome with some guys from the office a few years back and gave up keeping score when we finally reached the 18th hole. At the back of the short 18th hole was a parking lot for the golfers, protected by a very tall wire fence.

There was a steep hill leading down to a meandering creek below and, being the last to shoot, I put a couple of my golf balls into the creek. I flubbed a few more drives and sent a few more short drives into the trees that surrounded the hole. I was determined to get a good drive away and clear that creek and was getting angrier all the time. My fellow golfers humoured me in my attempts.

I teed up my ball, gave a look at that little white ball that had been defying me all day and took a vicious baseball swing. The ball took off like a rocket away up in the air. It cleared the creek – past the 18th green and over the wire fence. You could hear the ball bouncing on the roofs of the cars in the parking lot. There was a deadening silence in the group. Finally, someone spoke up. “You’d better not look for that ball, Frank.”

I complained to a friend of mine that occasionally when I was talking to an older person I knew extremely well, I couldn’t immediately recall his name and found it very embarrassing. She said: “Don’t let it bother you, Frank. He probably couldn’t recall your name, either.”

There was a story in the paper recently. It had a happy ending and was about a young man in a wheelchair who was crossing at an intersection. He failed to be noticed by a truck driver who couldn’t see him in front of his large vehicle because he was out of the driver’s line of vision. The truck driver drove some 10 kilometres with him pinned in his wheelchair to the front of his truck. The driver was totally unaware of him being in this predicament.

The police driving the opposite way noticed this strange situation, did a U-turn and chased the driver and stopped him. The young man told the police he had tried to make the truck driver aware of his presence, but was unsuccessful and thought he was a goner. He was unharmed in spite of his harrowing experience. The tires on his wheelchair were bald. The wheelchair had to be pried out of the front of the truck.

The young man’s caregiver told the police she was shocked when she reached the intersection and found her client had disappeared. No one there had seen where the guy in a wheelchair had gone.

I tried to visualize what happened when the truck driver got home from work that night. His wife would ask him:

“How’d it go today, dear?”

“Oh, fine. I pushed a guy in a wheelchair today.”
“You did?! You don’t get paid for pushing a guy in a wheelchair! What did you do with the truck? Park it beside a fire hydrant?”

“No, honey, the wheelchair was in front of the truck.”

“And you were pushing a wheelchair with your 10-tonne truck?!”

“Yeah. It was the police who stopped me after I had pushed him for 10 kilometres.”

“The police!” she screamed.

“I was at a stop sign at the intersection and didn’t see the guy in front of my truck.”

“And you drove 10 kilometres with a guy in a wheelchair in front of your truck?”

“I did start to smell burning tires, but I didn’t know where the smell was coming from. The tires were burnt right off his wheelchair. I think, honey, we’re going to have to buy him some new tires. The good news is that I think his wheelchair can be fixed.”

“What about the guy in the wheelchair? Is he okay?”

“Yeah, he’s fine. He’s a bit shook up. I offered to buy him a pole with a red flag on it so he doesn’t get any more free rides from truck drivers.”