The Accident #

This happened not that long after I had taken the Consulting job with Imaginet but was such a life changing moment for us that I felt it needed its own heading to talk about this event. After I was no longer riding the train with Mary, she did not want to go into LA by train but instead took my Maxima which is a more comfortable car, little more room. She and Renee would travel together as Renee was taking Fashion classes in downtown LA. One Thursday night they were coming home and the traffic was pretty much at a stand still. Some drunk woman in an SUV thought she would drive up the shoulder on the left side of the road. The shoulder narrows and is narrowed by these cement barricades which are slightly tapered. Well this SUV was coming pretty fast up the barricade and was airborne and landed on the roof my my Maxima. Missing Mary’s head by inches. I happened to be working from home that week so I was able to drive Mary’s Altima to go and pick them up.

Anyway, the girls were pretty shook up from this whole experience. The next week they stayed at a hotel close to work and during her breaks Mary started looking into apartments in the area. She found a really nice one that was just 500 steps from her office. Right across the street from the Disney Music Hall. This was a one bedroom apartment with about 800 sq feet. Renee set herself up in the living room and Mary got the bedroom. There were a few times when I stayed with them in the apartment and then it was quite tight and uncomfortable. Because Renee took up the living room there was no room for a sofa. Many times I would have to go down to the common area of the building on the first floor to do some work or just get out of their way.

They stayed in that apartment for over a year and then a two bedroom apartment opened up a few floors up with an even better view of the city and the Disney Music Hall. In the mean time I was travelling all the time and weeks were I was working from home, I would take Mary to the apartment on Sunday night and come back with the car so that I had it during the week then go back downtown and pick her up on Friday night. It was really nice being downtown as you never needed a car to get around there were so many choices available to you and everything you needed was so close by.

Eventually Renee finished her schooling and moved to her own place in Torrance and for a while Mary was looking for a roommate but they all seemed pretty scary. Then she realized that we had put all this money into the renovations to the kitchen and she wasn’t really getting to enjoy that. We left the apartment and moved back home. She also started going into the office, leaving the house by 4:30 am and was back early afternoon. She started having breathing problems and found that her oxygen levels were so low. While she was sorting this all out she was working from home. Even after the oxygen problem resolved itself she continued to work from home and I was still doing my weekly consulting engagements, which were even more frequent as many of the 14 consultants left and I had to cover. Most of the work was in the eastern time zone so I was flying every Sunday and coming home every Friday with just enough time to do my laundry and pack and get to the next engagement.