WHOA

[schlomo]

Whoa!

Recently, my wife and I have been engrossed in the TV series 9-1-1, a show filled with outrageously ingenious accident scenarios: people are crushed by a Humvee falling from a plane or catapulted into the underground depths of a missile silo or impaled by a rebar or a by a chain saw. The show has made me even more vigilant as I navigate the streets of Waikiki.

I was about to call 9-1-1 myself during my walk yesterday. A sloppy middle-aged man precariously balanced on a skate board lurched from the Ala Wai Boulevard to a patch of grass and then skidded to the sidewalk right in front of me. To avoid a collision, he pivoted up a ramp to an adjacent condo and clattered out of sight.  I feared that he was so much out of control that he might crash into the walls and plummet down the driveway.

Then, I heard a horrifying bone-jarring bang. The man may have wrecked the skateboard and perhaps irreparably injured himself.  Just as I was ready to call 9-1-1, I saw him ride down the ramp, he and his wobbly skateboard still visibly intact. As he safely passed by me, he sheepishly grinned, as if to apologize for scaring me and perhaps himself as well.

That incident was the closest I have ever come to reporting a potential disaster to 9-1-1.

I may not be a first responder, but my first response was to help save a misguided man who needs to take a crash course in skateboarding.