How’s This For an Unforgettable Memory?

Just read a news article on Yahoo News about a teenage boy from Milwaukee who was accidentally dumped in a garbage truck and compacted and miraculously managed to survive the ordeal with “non-life-threatening injuries”. The boy was discovered only after the truck had dumped its load at a recycling processing center.

How’s that for an unforgettable memory!

Reviewing my own past experiences, I can think of three “life threatening” events which I will probably never forget in my entire life.

One of them I’ve already written about before here (getting held up in a jeepney).

The other one happened at a beach when I was still very young… I think I was still in early grade school that time, in Davao City. At the time, my cousins and I frequented this beach called “Times Beach” which was just about a 10-minute bike ride away from my grandparents’ house (the beach, which has already become unsightly the last time I saw it several years ago, is situated behind the SM Mall).

I’m not a swimmer, though I’ve always enjoy diving and being able to touch the sand that lay beneath the water. I was doing just that when, suddenly, I was pulled into deeper waters by a strong current that I was underwater ‘til I have exhaled all the air I had in my lungs. Luckily for me, my cousin Carlo saw me and managed to pull me back to the surface. I thought I’m the only on who remembers this… but about a few years ago, to my surprise, he mentioned about it while we were having our customary drinking session.

Another incident occurred when I was still working at/for a construction company some eight years ago…

Since the stairs of the two-storey house we were building was still not usable, we had to go up and down floors via a makeshift (wooden) scaffolding.

On that fateful day, as I was preparing to go down the scaffolding (yes, from the second storey), I planted my right foot on a diagonal brace and the flip-flop I was wearing at the time slipped from under my foot (well, it was my foot that slipped off of the flip-flop) which sent me plummeting to the ground that was littered/covered with concrete rubble (remnants of the old structure). I’m thinking I must be lucky to have the concrete rubble to fall on, because if I would have landed on solid concrete pavement, I believe, I would have suffered more than the wounds I got which ran down the whole length of both of my forearms and a dislocated thumb. What do you think?