OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The Risk Pool
By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN
Published: August 26, 2013
BELGRADE LAKES, Me. — THIRTY-SEVEN years ago this week my friend Pearce Bunting was at the wheel of my Volkswagen and I was in the passenger seat when he drove the car off a road in suburban Philadelphia. It bounced off a fire hydrant and then plunged into a small ravine. I remember thinking, as we flew through the air, that I was about to find out whether there was life after death. I heard the crash as if from a distant room. Then a vague blue blob spoke. “Are you all right?” it wanted to know, and then said, more reassuringly, “You’re going to be all right.”
It was the first day of my senior year in high school. That compassionate blue blob turned out to be a policeman in uniform, standing over me as I lay on my back in the middle of Darby Road, staring up at a light blue sky. My glasses had been thrown off in the wreck, which is why everything was so blurry.
The officer got me into an ambulance and on to Bryn Mawr Hospital, where emergency-room doctors sewed my left ear back on. The officer also managed to retrieve my school books from the totaled car. And so it was that later that night I was…
