Several years ago, I got shot at with a pellet gun while traveling down the highway during rush hour in St. Louis. The air conditioner on my Blazer was broken so I had the window down and my elbow on the sill when I heard a loud “Smak!” against the doorframe just a couple of inches behind my head. I thought I’d been hit by a rock kicked up by a car in the left lane and just kept going. Later, when I got home, I looked at that doorframe and found a perfectly round pellet-sized crater about 1/8 of an inch deep in the steel. Paint was chipped out, of course, making a stark silver contrast against the navy blue finish of the truck. I drove a short way to a police station and asked the cop at the desk what he made of it.
“Looks like somebody took a shot at you with a pellet gun,” he remarked. Didn’t seem too surprised. It is St. Louis, after all. Later that evening, I contemplated what it would have been like if the thing had actually hit me. I suppose it would have buried itself somewhere in my skull, and I suppose it would have hurt quite a bit. It began to rattle me. Lots of “what ifs.”
What if it had hit me in the temple and gone into my brain?
What if it had been an actual bullet?
What if I had lost control and rolled the truck?
What if my kids had been with me?
What if, what if, what if….
I had the luxury of afterthought because when it happened, I never remotely considered I had been “shot” at with anything. The notion was so far from my reality that it just wasn’t a thing. If, for some reason, it had been a thing, and I’d realized it was some sort of a shot, I probably would have panicked and flipped out. I know that if I had crashed the car, the last thing I would have said to the EMTs is “Let me get my shoes.”
BS. I was in a very bad auto accident a couple of years ago. Head on, totaled both cars, my head went through the drivers window, and the other person died. First thing I did when I got out of the truck was look for my fishing pole that had been in the back of the truck.