One Saturday morning not too long ago, I got in my car a little after 9 a.m. to drive down to Springfield and spend some time with old friends of mine.

I decided to take the back route to the Coolidge Bridge from where I live on Old Farm Road in Amherst. It offers up more nature than Route 9, and this was one of those times I wanted that.

After I turned onto Station Road, I slowed down where it crosses the Norwottuck Rail Trail, in case any bikers, walkers, or runners were so into their endorphins, their thoughts, or their phones that they neglected to look both ways before entering the intersection.

Then I drove slowly over the patch of Station Road between the rail trail and Hop Brook. At the time, that was one of those sections of Amherst roads that had so many holes and bumps it could have served as driver training for the back roads of the Himalayas.

When I drove up to the intersection of Station Road and S. East Street, I stopped and looked to my right for any oncoming vehicles.

When I turned to look the other way, I saw a huge tag sale taking place on the lawn of a house on the other side of the South Amherst Common, at maybe a 45-degree angle to my left. I like to check out tag sales if I happen upon them, partly out of frugality, and partly for the housebroken adventure of seeing if I can create my own “Antiques Roadshow.”

I decided I had the time to take a quick walk through the tag sale, no more than five minutes in duration, and I headed into the intersection to do so.

A big, white pickup truck flew by me at a high speed, coming horrifically close to broadsiding me on the driver’s side. My ruminating on the possibility of checking out the tag sale had caused me to neglect looking all the way to my left for oncoming vehicles. I found it positively eerie the way the truck didn’t even break stride despite the nearness of a collision, as if it was oblivious to anything but its own momentum.

If you saw the size and speed of that truck and considered the size of my Toyota Corolla, you would know why I had no doubt that I’d just come as close as I’d ever come to my last moment. Yeah, there was the possibility that I’d “only” have been maimed in a life-changing way, but I couldn’t imagine my surviving that humongous truck plowing into my door at its high speed.

I knew that even though the truck was probably above the speed limit, I was at fault for getting so distracted by that tag sale that I neglected to look all the way to my left before entering the intersection. But that wouldn’t have made me any less dead.

As you may have gathered from my recounting of my journey to that intersection that morning, I hadn’t planned on meeting my end there. At my age, if you are at all capable of inductive reasoning, and you are not acutely in denial, you’ve gleaned that the grim reaper is harvesting your generation, but you don’t think your turn to be gathered up will be at the next intersection.

And how could I help but think that if all of the actions I took and did not take that morning had led me to entering that intersection one second earlier, it might very well have been my last second. I guess that’s what they mean by “fate.” 

I was going to end this column by quoting some poetry written by someone else, verse that doubled down on the dominion of death and how it can come in a moment deceptively wrapped up like any other moment.

Then I realized that there was more unadorned raw truth than poetry to what I felt in my gut as I watched that truck speed on down the road.

So instead of poetry, I’ll end this column as suddenly as my life came ever so close to ending on that just-like-any-other Saturday morning, and put a period right here.

Amherst resident Richard McCarthy, a longtime columnist at the Springfield Republican, writes a monthly column for the Gazette.