Mr X's Story

This happened to my mother, and has become one of those stories that "stays" in the family, to be trotted out from time to time.

This occurred before my birth, when my mother was left on her own with two little girls to support. She worked as a waitress.

How or where she met a truck driver I'll call Mr. X I don't know. The restaurant where she worked was in downtown Philadelphia, and she never really gave any account of how they met. Be that as it may, they fell in love and planned a life together.

Mr. X was a long-distance trucker, and he and Mom decided to move to Florida. There was one thing, though--he had one last trip to make before they could set to work on the various details.

Well, he'd given my mother the number to a truck stop somewhere in western North Carolina, one where he usually paused after crossing the Smokies from Tennessee.

The night before he was due to arrive there, Mom had a dream of a place she'd never been (and would never see in her lifetime). It was a mountainous area, and she saw a rig coming over from the other side. Something went very wrong, though, and it overturned, rolling three times.

Mom was never one to put much stock in anything that smacked of the psychic, but she mentioned it to her mother before she left for work at the restaurant.

Around noon, she called the truck stop. She'd done this often enough in the past that the men who worked there knew who she was. In true Southern fashion, they always called her 'Miss Dolly' (her name was Dolores).

Well, she placed the call and asked if Mr. X had come in yet, she was greeted with silence, then the man who'd taken the call said, "Hold on a minute, Miss Dolly, I'll go get Zip (the owner) right away!"

I think Mom knew what was coming. When Zip got on the line he told her there had been an accident. Mr. X had fallen asleep as he was crossing into North Carolina from Tennessee. The rig had rolled three times.

Mom went on with her life, of course, though I don't think she ever really forgot Mr. X. I know she never forgot the dream that had been, sadly, all too true.

There's a funny (strange, not ha-ha) postscript to this.

I moved to North Carolina and have lived here most of my adult life, something I'd never imagined in my childhood or adolescence. The story Mom had told us girls once upon a time in the Philadelphia metro area had become half-forgotten, a factoid I'd never even bothered to share with my boys.

Almost ten years ago my husband, my younger son, a friend of ours and her daughter, had to travel to Cookeville, Tennessee, to pick up her RV (long story there). On the way home, I had to drive our van, accompanied by my younger son, who was 17 at the time.

As I came east on I-40 in North Carolina, not far tom the Tennessee line, something seemed to tell me that I wasn't far from the spot where the accident had occurred all those years ago.

I shuddered involuntarily. My son asked what was wrong, and it was then that the story was passed on to another generation...