And suddenly

In the September Car and Driver, editor-in-chief Csaba Csere says goodbye to technical assistant Mike Lapprich, all of twenty-two, who was killed in an accident in one of their long-term test cars. This isn't the first time a C/D staffer has had a wreck; this isn't even the first time a C/D staffer has died in a wreck. But it's a grim reminder that even the best cars, even the best drivers, are still subject to the Reaper's quota system.

I mention this because when I was turning seven, I came down with double pneumonia and scarlet fever. Simultaneously. I missed nearly two months of school and broke a couple of thermometers. Up to that point, this was about as close as I got to a meeting with that scythe-wielding son of a bitch; I didn't really come close again until 1985, when a petroleum tanker truck making too tight a left turn didn't notice my teensy little sports coupe under his midsection.

Now it's 2003 and I've gotten, so far as can be determined, another visit from the Pneumonia Fairy. This time, he's not presenting himself as particularly harsh, and it seems unlikely that I'll suffer any permanent damage from his little jaunt through my lungs. (The earlier incident, I have always suspected, caused some very specific forms of dain bramage.) But pneumonia comes in a number of different flavors, and scoring a relatively minor one, while something of a relief, isn't exactly a testimonial to my stamina; with a different variety of the disease, I could wind up just as dead as that poor fellow from Car and Driver, and without benefit of having driven the whee out of a 350Z, either.

If there's a lesson here, it's simply this: the number of times you cheat Death equals the number of times you cross his path — minus one.