...was Friday Dec 13, 1974. Yes, Friday the 13th.

My parents were away that night, watching my brother play High School basketball. They had never, up until that point, ever missed a single game of his. Basketball was going to be my brother's ticket to the Big Time, you see--his passport out of small town Indiana. Never mind that every young boy of that era growing up in small towns all over Indiana wanted to play college or pro ball. My brother had dreams of being the next Rick Mount. At 6'4" he was a little small in stature for such a big dream, but dream he did.

My sister, 2 foster-sisters, and I were being watched by a lady we knew from church. My foster-brother was out on a date. Yes, we had six kids in our family at the time; this number will become significant to my story later. I was eleven years old on that day.

About ten o'clock the phone rang. It was another lady from church. When I answered she asked for Ruth, our sitter, and when Ruth got whatever message there was to be gotten, she suddenly got very nervous, asking me, "Do you know how to make coffee?" "My dad drinks instant." I said.

About fifteen minutes later the phone rang again. Ruth lunged for it. She asked me to take the three younger kids out of the room for a minute while she talked on the phone. I did as she asked, without even questioning what was going on.

A few minutes later, Ruth called us back into the room and rather unceremoniously said, "There's been an accident. I don't know if your parents are dead or not." That was the extent of her conversation about it. She went outside to smoke a cigarette.

The four of us girls just sat there in the living room crying while she had a smoke. When she came in, I asked her to take me to the hospital. She replied that someone was coming to pick us all up and take us somewhere to stay, but that she was going home after that, because "her nerves were shot."

I don't remember much of the rest of the night, but we woke up the next morning at our pastor's house, and he told us that our parents were alive, but would be in the hospital for a couple of weeks; we would be staying with him.

For the next ten days or so, all four of us slept piled in a double bed. The pastor was also a bus driver, so he drove us to school. Of course, it meant riding his entire route, and getting up at about 5:30 in the morning to sit on a cold bus for two hours. My other strong memory of this time is the dogs. The pastor, in addition to driving a school bus, also was a breeder of German Shepherds, and the dogs had the run of the house in winter. Big, terrifying dogs.

Finally, miraculously, on Dec 24, my parents came home from the hospital, but were pretty banged up and confined to their room. That was the day I learned what had happened: while coming home from my brother's game, my parents had been broadsided by a drunk off-duty sherriff's deputy who fled the scene while my parents lay on the cold pavement, after getting out of the car, but, according to witnesses, crumpling to the ground as soon as they got out.

By the time he was found, he had sobered up, and lawyered-up, as the saying goes. I can't help but think that law enforcement took its sweet time in finding him. Small town, after all.

Since my parents were recovering from their injuries, the work of the household had to be performed by us kids. My brother was exempted from doing any housework because of his need to practice basketball both before and after school. My foster-brother went to temporarily live with a relative after the accident. That left 11-year-old me. I was the one on whom the responsibilities fell.

I must admit, I guess I had led a pretty sheltered life up until that point. I had no idea what it took to run a household of 7 or 8 people. By about Dec 29, I was a pro at cooking dinner, cleaning up, doing the family's laundry, vacuuming, and making sure my three younger siblings and I had breakfast and got off to school each day. Neighbors and church people looked in on my parents during the day, but by 3:30 I was back home and in charge.

The time my father had to take off work was unpaid, so the family was without income for over a month. Church people annonymously came to the house and left bags of food outside, sometimes courteously ringing the bell before running back to their cars and sometimes not...meaning that sometimes the produce or dairy froze before I could figure out what to do with it. Other times I was stuck with trying to figure out how to feed seven people with what the well-meaning people left us. How does an eleven-year-old cook dinner with a bag of flour and canned yams? My brother started eating dinner at his friends' houses. I didn't have that luxury.

My mother was never the same after that accident. She has been disabled in one form or another since that day. We eventually lost our house; the attempts to sue the man who ran into my parents failed. My foster-brother got kicked out of his sister's house and came back to live with us. The county felt that the two little ones, the foster-sisters, would be better off somewhere else with parents who weren't incapacitated. I often feel guilty about feeling so happy about that decision.

But I was unprepared to raise six kids, including myself.

People often ask me why my kids don't have more chores around the house, why I still do my fiften-year-old's laundry, do the lion's share of the cooking and the cleaning. It's still difficult for me to put into words what it felt like to have so much responsibility at such a young age, and how those events of 31 years ago changed not only my parents, but me.

I learned that day to be completly self-reliant and self-sufficient. I learned that day that *I* am the one who looks out for me. I learned that day that everything I will need will have to come from me. I learned that day that no one else in this world will take care of me.

Those are dangerous messages. They lie in direct opposition to the Gospel. I am determined to not pass those messages along to my children.