Part 8 was published December 10, 2023, and can be found here.

Some activities in the last sixty years:

DODGED BULLETS

Savannah also gave me a list of things that she thought I should mention. Another on that list is the bullets I have dodged. It is difficult for one to make it 84 years through life without some serious bumps in the road.

It just happens. In fact, the Denver surgeon who put "Humpty Dumpty" back together after "Humpty Dumpty had a great fall" told me this, "I work in a Level One trauma center. I see some really bad stuff. It’s often hard.to find anybody toblame because it matters not who you are, how good or bad you have been, accidents happen." He also told me that I had an angel. About a month after leaving the hospital, we were back for a final set of x-rays to make sure everything had healed properly. He had my x-rays up on the wall showing me everything that had been broken including my pelvis and all of my ribs on the right side. The edge of the basket that lit on was fairly close to my spine, and one edge of the basket caught me about the shoulder blades. The surgeon pointed and said that if I would have lit one inch to the left or one inch to the right, we would not be having this conversation. So yes, I can tell you I do appreciate that angel.

The next close call was a literal bullet. We were driving north from Holly towards home. We drove past a pasture with a lot of prairie dogs, and a couple of pickups out in the middle of it. I had just made a comment to Sherell that it looked like somebody was thinning the prairie dog population when we heard a loud bang. I said, “We have been hit!", but I didn't know where. We went over a rise and out of sight from the hunters.

Sherell stopped and I got out to see where the bullet might have hit. The tires were not flat, and I couldn't see any holes in the fender. I straightened up to get back in and, oh, there it was - in the doorpost between the front seat and the back seat. The next day, the wildlife service agent and county sheriff's office asked if they could retrieve that bullet in case they had to identify which rifle it came from. There were five hunters and seventeen rifles. Five hunters were arrested, and seventeen rifles were confiscated. The investigators stuck a pencil in the bullet hole and asked me to sit in the seat. They took pictures to show how close to my head it came.

It measured five inches. If Sherell had been driving a microsecond slower, I wouldn't be telling this story.

The third scary event was a bit unusual. I had flown to the ranch west of Punkin Center to help our employee vaccinate a bunch of new cattle for shipping fever. We had quite a few sick calves. At about noon, I crawled back in our Cessna and headed home. Luckily, I was a few thousand feet off the ground when I went to sleep. When the plane built up speed on kind of a slow decline in a big circle, it developed a wind whistle.

That noise woke me up and, thankfully, I was still probably 800 feet or more from the ground. Again, somebody saved my bacon.

Those angels have been busy. But the flipside of this coin is that, after things like that happen, even years later, I keep asking, "Okay, you saved me. What is it that I'm supposed to be doing? Please answer."

Next: MARRIAGE