The truth about what happened in the back seat of that Ford

I've never been entirely comfortable with the thought of an entire generation raised riding backward. And now that they've grown to adulthood - chronologically speaking, at least, many of them - I sometimes wonder if that's why, as a nation, we don't seem to know where we're going anymore but are obsessed with where we've been.

The American Academy of Pediatrics still says kids should be made to ride backwards until they are at least one, and worse that "the safest place for all infants and children younger than 13 years to ride is in the back seat."

Now, I'm a geezer and a curmudgeon, and hopelessly out of touch, so in conscience I should allow they might be right in some bizarre, healthy way. But it sure didn't happen that way for me. I was four, maybe five, when my own back seat adventure happened, in an old Ford coupe. My sister, a couple of years younger, was in the front seat with my Mom and I was alone back there when, right on the main street in the middle of the town my Mom rear-ended somebody who was backing out of a parking spot. Of course the story was that he front-ended her (uh huh) but I was in the back seat so I can only guess the story about that.

What I do know about is this. That old Ford had a curious design feature - there was no outside door to the trunk, but instead the back of the back seat folded forward to provide access. And the impact of the collision overpowered the seat back latch, and just like that the seat back flipped down and bent me double, trapped me with my face between my knees, unable to muster enough breath to utter more than a small, pathetic squeak, much less push the seat back up and escape. My sister, meanwhile - perverse even at that early age - attempted to fly through the front windshield. I learned that part later. At the time all that was clear to me were the sounds of screaming, a siren, some ambulance guys, and then a growing awareness that somehow I had been forgotten in all the excitement, and would surely die. And the upholstery in that damn Ford was covered with bristles of the most vicious kind, and I was wearing short pants. Hell hath no fury like the back seat of that Ford.

I don't recall my life flashing before me which should have tipped me off, I guess, but I was too young to know about such things then and anyway maybe it did and I just didn't notice. It would have been, after all, pretty short.

Eventually, though, I was rescued. And, American Academy of Pediatrics to the contrary, I was 13 or so before I began to develop any interest in ever getting into a back seat again, I being an American male and it being the 50s by then, and all. But nothing of any lasting interest ever happened to me in a back seat after that. So if it's true, that thing about my life flashing before me, I'd just as soon fast-forward through the back seat part if that's OK.

And I still don't like to wear short pants.

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