Buckle Up!

What is your reason for not using your seatbelt in the car? Do you feel confined and uncomfortable?

If you feel confined wearing a seatbelt; it’s similar to wearing the mask during the pandemic at first.

Do you feel that you might be trapped in the car if somehow it goes into the water or about to burn?

I’m here to tell you, seatbelts are made much better now than years ago. In some of these newer cars, the moment you shut your door and turned on the engine, your seatbelt will buckle you in; so you don’t have to bother.

In the past seatbelts wasn’t much pushed; until the government made it mandatory to wear your seatbelt or be fined.

Matter of fact, if your mother was anything like my mother, she was the seatbelt. Whenever my mother would come to a quick stop; she would used her arm to blocked you from going forward into the windshield. Even after seatbelts were required, she would still felt necessary to put her arm in front of you.

When in school and going through driver’s training, they would show horror films of car accidents and what would happened if you weren’t wearing your seatbelt. You would either be thrown from the vehicle through the windshield or fall out the door and maybe even get rolled over.

Not once did they showed footage of a person being trapped inside the car before it exploded or goes under water. Even though, that was in the back of many minds at the time to prevent people from wearing their seatbelts.

I have to admit, I felt that way myself. It’s depend who I was with, how quick I put my seatbelt on. But things later change for me on the ideas of putting on my seatbelt.

One of the things that I have in common with Hank Williams Jr., we came close to being killed in a mountain accident.

It was the summer of the year my mother had passed away. I was on vacation out to Washington State. That was the year I had flown for my second time in an airplane. I was out visiting relatives that summer. I was with one of my cousin, as she took me and two of her granddaughters up Mount Rainier to see the sight. We took the road as high that it went before coming back down. As we were going back down, we came upon the same slow car going up. Anyway, that car was stopped in the middle of our lane. We weren’t going very fast; but when a person is going downhill, you cannot stop on a dime. There was really no warning when we hit that car.

I don’t know if you believe in angels watching over a person; but I believed that my mother was watching over me on my vacation when I was in a car accident on Mount Rainier.

I heard people say that I was very lucky to be alive today. The way we hit the other car, I could had been hurt much worse than what I was.

I believed it was a combination of my mother’s spirit watching over me to keep me safe, the seatbelt I was wearing, and the airbags that deployed as we hit the other car. If it wasn’t for the seatbelt and my mother’s spirit; I could had went smack into the airbag. I could had broken my glasses and maybe even my neck or back upon collision.

As they were prying my cousin out of her seat, someone else was checking on me to make sure that I had no concussion or badly injured. They even had me sit still outside on the side of the road until everything was ok with me to move.

So you see, the mountain tried to kill not only Hank Williams Jr., but also me. I still loved the mountains though. They are so beautiful and peaceful.

So ever since that accident, I have gained the ultimate respect for wearing my seatbelt. I don’t even hesitate in putting my seatbelt on, no matter who I am with. I’m forever grateful that I’m alive today because of wearing my seatbelt, and for the airbag that deployed when it did. I’m even grateful that my mother was watching over me from up in heaven. You could say, she put her arms in front of me as the car came to a sudden stop to prevent me from going head first into the airbag and causing more damage to me.

After a year of being lockdown because of his Pandemic that we were in, people are itching to get out and travel. They are tired of being cooped up. In the words of May West, “Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!” Seatbelts does save lives despite being uncomfortable. I’m living proof of it!