Rough Draft

When I was 32, my brother died. He had been battling cancer since he was 15. A month before Jason passed away, he came to me and told me that he was leaving me some money. I didn't want it, I just wanted my brother. He said that he knew that there was something I had always wanted, and he wanted me to be able to get it. He was right. I had always dreamed of owning a Corvette. But I was married to my high school sweetheart, and we had 2 little girls, a mortgage, and I worked 2 jobs to pay the bills. It was just too impractical. So Jason told me, “When I am gone, I want you to take the money I am leaving you, and I want you to get a Corvette. I know you would never do it otherwise, and I want you to have it.”

At the time, I didn't realize that I was so close to losing my brother. But prepared or not, he went into the hospital 3 weeks later. What the doctors first thought was pneumonia turned out to be a tumor that had grown in his left lung, and he was riddled with the evil, out-of-control cancer cells. Losing my brother was the most painful experience of my life. But I did do what he asked of me. I took the money he left me, and I bought a Corvette. I loved that car. For me, it was like a connection that only my brother and I had. In that car I would remember all of the trouble he and I used to get into.

A year later, I got a knock on the door of the home I shared with my wife and children. It was my neighbors, and they told me they had to talk to me. They told me that while I was working 2 jobs to keep my wife and children in the expensive house that we loved, that my wife, who refused to work, was sleeping with the RICH neighbor across the street. She was leaving my little girls alone during their naps, and meeting him while I was gone. They had a plan to have me thrown out. Unfortunately, the warning came too late. I was thrown out of my home, ripped away from my little girls, and the only life I had ever known.

And then it happened. I went out with my friend, and had more than a couple of drinks.

Then I left the bar and my friend, and went out in the Corvette, looking for a race. I pulled up to the stop light at National going west on Chestnut, and what should pull up beside me but a Trans Am. When the light turned green, we floored it. Somehow I jumped the curb, and rolled my car over. It only took me a second to climb out of my car, and then I pushed my car back onto its wheels. I tried to drive home, but less than a block from OTC I saw flashing lights. The officers that pulled me over knew that I had been racing. I remember babbling something about what was going on with my wife, and the officers seemed to relax a bit. But they wouldn't let me drive my car home, even though I wasn't drunk. In fact, they made me call my parents. I was given a ticket, and sent on my way with a broken car and a bunch of fines for racing.

I could have kidded myself, and called it bad luck. I could have told myself that it was the first time I had ever gotten behind the wheel of a car with alcohol in me, so I should just go on and not worry about it. But the fact was, I could have died that night. And my daughters would have had to live without their daddy. Or I could have gotten a DUI that night, and lost my daughters in a completely different way. I broke the gift my brother gave me, but it was probably a good thing that things happened the way they did. I learned a valuable lesson. I learned that one bad decision can cause you to lose everything that you care about.