Life Changing Event

           After reading my post of the tenth of August I got to thinking about the landfill and that reminded me of something I think about frequently. There are many times in a person's life when one step, one miscue, perhaps one word can change that person's life. I wonder how many times can a single circumstance change a life dramatically and maybe the person never knows it? This story has that theme. 

          My father was living in Camdenton Missouri in 1973. In those days there was no trash service there, so one had to carry trash to an open landfill and just dump it. He was working up in Sunrise Beach Missouri at the time. He rented a house in Camdenton. The landfill was just three blocks away in Camdenton, but he did not like to go there, preferring to go up to Sunrise Beach and dump trash there on his way to work. On the fateful day of his head-on crash on the highway, he was going to work with bags of trash in his van, ready to dump in Sunrise Beach. Had he stopped to dump his trash in Camdenton near the house, he would not have been at the spot on the highway, at the time, where the accident occurred, when a negligent driver passed a car going the opposite way on a curve and nearly killed my father. 

          He nearly died in 1973 and had health problems the rest of his life. His leg was mangled in that accident and he had circulation problems the remainder of his life. The bad circulation led to his losing half of his leg later in life. He died less than a month after his 70th birthday. Had it not been for a bag of trash to dump or heading for the wrong landfill he may have lived an additional decade or more.