The deer tried to jump over my moving car but misjudged her landing. The front corner of my car clipped a leg and hoof which twisted the torso of the deer into the driver's side door, hard. I was going 55 mph on a rural highway. The side impact force sent me, my passenger, and our car into an uncontrolled spin toward the ditch on the other side of the road. And that event, which probably took one or two seconds of measurable time, was my slow motion moment. "Slow down!" I heard Darrell (my passenger) shout. With that comment, my concept of time stopped. It happened to be during the backward portion of the uncontrolled spinout. I turned my gaze from the retreating road and my attention from my grip on the steering wheel and moved my gaze and attention toward him. I looked, even stared, at the side of his head as he was seated in my passenger seat, and I thought, "Look at you; what in the hell do you think that I am trying to do?" Now, I recognize that compound sentence of thought alone would take more than two seconds, but as I said, rational time stopped. Rather than think about my passenger's safety, correcting my course, or about the totality of my life, the potential of my death, the deer, or about traffic, I was simply aghast at being criticized with such an infantile level of demonstrable nonsense. Clearly, his was not a helpful comment. It still stands, now years later, as a uniquely illustrative, and possibly defining, moment about me. Which makes it important. Clearly.
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