It’s after midnight, and some lunatic is banging on the front door. I don’t know how long they had been banging, but I was coming out of a deep sleep and wasn’t moving very quickly. In my mind, though, I know this can’t be a good situation.
We were in an upstairs bedroom because Jennifer needed to have the master bedroom downstairs. As I come out of the bedroom, I can see the blue lights flashing in the window. Again, this is not good. I dressed well enough to answer the door, and it was a Henry County police officer. She explained that some young lady was drunk driving and had demolished my mailbox and her car. In my mind, I’m asking her why she thought she needed to wake me up with that information, but the only thing I actually asked her was if the young lady was OK. She assured me she was, and that was about it.
I don’t know how many times my mailbox had been destroyed over the years, but it was more than a few. I had gotten so tired of replacing them that I had Billy Stewart make me one out of thick steel. It was built like a tank. People still hit it, but it was barely scratched. It got plowed over once and did so much damage that I decided to go back to the traditional one. After the DUI crash, I got several more hours of sleep, got out of bed, and ran to Home Depot. I had the new mailbox up and replaced before lunch. Just another day on Jonesboro Road.
In the early afternoon, there’s another knock on the door. This time it’s the same young lady, and she’s with her father. He brought the girl to apologize, which she did. I got the feeling that she’s been read the riot act and didn’t feel the need to pile on, so I just told her I was glad she was OK. She was horrified to be there, and I hope she had learned a valuable lesson about drinking and driving. Her father also apologized, said he had noticed I had already replaced the mailbox and insisted that he pay for it. I never saw them again, but I felt like the father was a stand-up guy, and his daughter probably learned her lesson. I hope so.
One wrong decision and lives are changed in an instant. I remember cases when I was a teenager where people I knew drove drunk and killed or seriously injured a good friend. They were tragedies for everyone involved, and one of the worst things is they could have been prevented so easily.
“Since MADD’S founding in 1980, we have reduced drunk driving fatalities by half and saved nearly 380,000 lives. We have done that by focusing on changing social norms through legislation and education. What was once a joke on late night television, is now considered unacceptable. One important aspect of that societal shift is changing how we talk about the crime. MADD believes that drunk and drugged driving incidents are crashes not accidents because they are the result of choice, not chance. This seemingly insignificant change in lexicon reinforces that drunk and drugged driving are 100 percent preventable crimes, 100 percent of the time.”
– Adam W. Vanek, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, National Chief Executive Officer