Apparently I Flipped Over
I Didn’t Expect to Be Writing This Chapter...I thought my book was finished. Or maybe life just has a funny way of happening in retirement.
I was headed home to finish the final hours of uploading the manuscript for my retirement book. The car held a strange collection of ordinary things: groceries, bird seed, a five-gallon bucket of latex paint for the basement project, bread, milk, and eggs.
I had worked hard to protect the eggs because, as we all know, no one really needs cracked eggs on the kitchen floor. It felt like an ordinary Saturday. One more errand. One more project. One more quiet step toward finishing something meaningful.
And then...
The road. The curve. The radio. The weather. The silence.
And then, a head-on collision on a country road.
I don’t remember much—not even the impact. No screeching tires. No exploding glass. No sound of twisting metal. No dramatic movie scene. Nothing. Just absence.
And then...
A voice. Someone talking. A question. Someone asked if I was okay. A strange question considering I had no idea of my condition. Someone asked if I could move. Someone asked if I had a seatbelt on. Oddly enough, I remember thinking: Apparently, I did.
Then came the absurdity.
The paint. The former Mike the Painter covered in paint. Life interrupting the schedule. Not tragedy. Just strange, inconvenient, deeply human absurdity.
Apparently, my seventy-nine-year-old body had turned and flipped, leaving me on the passenger side in a pool of—not blood—but paint. On the way to the hospital, I realized I was headed somewhere with no memory of a crash or what I was doing in an ambulance.
Maybe a Saturday afternoon at Grandma’s. Maybe nowhere at all. But when I made it to the emergency room, the staff stood me up, helped me walk a few steps, and gently informed me I was a little too dirty to enter. So there I stood while they washed my bleeding hands and face with warm soapy, water, and unexpected kindness.
They quietly became my superheroes.
Later, I wondered if I might win some sort of award for the most unusual patient of the year. It wasn’t Halloween. And they knew it.
As I arrived at the next step of the intake journey, I found myself reflecting on earlier chapters of my retirement book—those moments where I wrote about retirement opening unexpected seasons of life.
New adventures. New people. New places. New experiences.
Sheila happened to be assigned as my nurse for the day among the many who entered my room. What had already happened we might call a mishap was quietly became a blessing. I have learned and taught for decades what Mother Teresa once said:
One person need not change the world. Instead, change it for one person.
Sheila calmed my soul and lifted my spirit. We talked about our lives. The past. The present. The future. They were brief conversations, as I wasn't her only patient.
But they were real. And comforting.
She returned when possible, each encounter a blessing – not knowing if she would return – but before leaving she offered a new and very important suggestion.
Since every story needs a title, and since. you spent much of my life painting houses, she decided I needed a new nickname:
Mike the Painted.
And laughing with a new line for my resume, I thought about the retirement manuscript waiting at home, I realized something unexpected.
Many of the ideas I had written about over the past year—new people, new adventures, new conversations, new possibilities—had somehow followed me into a hospital room.
Not because I was looking for them. And certainly not because I would have chosen this path.
But there they were.
Apparently, retirement still had a few introductions left to make.