July 4th, 1977

I am sitting propped up with pillows in the waiting room of the intensive care unit of Cox Memorial Hospital in Springfield, Missouri. My grandmother is sleeping in the chair next to me in all of her obese intensity as matriarch of the Waite family. My father is down the hallway where he has been in intensive care since last Saturday night after his neck was broken in a terrible car wreck out on the highway. Drunk and brawling with his cowboy buddies– he had called my mother to come and get him. On their way home– apparently on a dark stretch of highway– a van, a dark blue van pulled out onto the road in front of them with no lights. Neither of them even remember in happening. Ka-blam. Next conscious recollection: hospital. Quite a car wreck.

Last night, sprawled across the floor of the living room in my father’s trailer I watched the film on the news. There is a living color on channel 3, I saw my twitching father being hauled on a stretcher into an ambulance and a closeup of the front end of my mother’s car smashed like a cheap toy. I was called yesterday morning and immediately threw my jeans on and was here within a few hours. With virtually no thought at all I found myself suddenly back in my home town surrounded by the entire clan which I never expected to see again.

So the old man’s finally been knocked off his horse. 

He’s totally paralyzed from the waist down.

Paralyzed. Immobile. Rendered defenseless. Finally.

Finally, you old sonovabitch, I’m not afraid of you now.