by Harold Burch
My sister and I were quite small when it happened. I can remember going into the kitchen and seeing my father lying on the couch sleeping, except there was a large bandage around his head. We were told to stay quiet. They told us the ambulance was coming to take him to the hospital.
The next thing we heard was this huge machine on the road. It had large skis on the front and big caterpillar tracks on the back. Our road was not snowplowed for cars in those days.
They carried my father and put him inside this machine and took him to the hospital. They tell me he was unconscious for a number of days in the hospital, but he did return and he was the same father.
He passed away in his seventy-first year,
but this was not the result of his accident. My father was a heavy smoker,
and this finally got the best of him.