The happiest day of my life

First, some notes. It has been nearly two months since my last post. There is nothing wrong. I simply ran out of things about which to write. Then I tried to write a couple of weeks ago, but had problems with my computer. And since I can no longer remember how to deal with computer problems, I was stuck. Finally I texted Evan and he found what I needed by searching Google, so hopefully now things are working properly.

Second, Ellie Jade is scheduled to arrive just a week from tomorrow. Mirjam looks like she is wearing a basketball and Evan is thrilled to death in anticipation. So are Jean and I, planning all the ways we will be helping to raise our first grandchild.

But the happiest day of my life – so far – was this past Sunday. I finally got to meet Maria Reyna Paculba, the girl who started my journey through what has been the best two-and-a-half years in my life! After I had moved home from having being in the hospital for two months and then living at the Centre for Neuro Skills for another seven months, Jean gave me a lot of papers that had accumulated over those months, including the Dallas Police report of the accident. From that report I had the name and address of the driver of the car that hit me. On February 24, 2014, I finally wrote her a short letter to tell her that I was doing well and really wanted to meet her. Here is what I wrote:

Maria,

This is Patrick Spreng. I don’t know if you remember me, but I would like to meet you (again). I am the guy you hit with your car on November 1, 2012, and I am now well along on the road to recovery. I only want to meet you and let you know how wonderfully my life is going since that day!

Is there any way you could call me or email me, so we can set up a way to meet and go over “old times”?

I hope to hear from you very soon!

Although it took her fourteen months to get the courage to respond, last Wednesday she emailed me in response to that letter, expressing a willingness to meet me. Sunday the four of us – Jean and I along with Maria and her husband Ruel – had lunch together at La Madeleine, and it was wonderful!

We talked for nearly three hours. When she first saw me, she said, “You look so thinner!” because over the past thirty months I have lost more than ninety pounds! She told me about the incident from her perspective, not being able to see the group of pedestrians because of the sun in her eyes, seeing Alyson Abel Mills extend her hands in surprise. Then she jumped out of her car, ran up to me, found no pulse or any breathing, and immediately began giving me CPR. I also leared that there was a second nurse in the car with her, both of whom had just gotten off work at UT Southwestern, and both of whom worked to give me CPR. Maria also described how difficult it had been for these past two-and-a-half years thinking about what happened to us with anguish.

After the ambulance had taken me to Parkland’s Emergency Room, She had tried to find out what my status was, but the people she spoke with at Parkland would not give her any information – HIPAA security rules prevented that, and she did not even know my name. She says she did hear someone call me “Patrick” while she was trying to save my life, but Parkland would give her no help at all. She did find out from talking to her automobile insurance agent that I was seriously injured, but was still alive and in recovery.

From the emails I had sent her since last Wednesday, she learned about my blog and had read all of it to learn about my development and recovery, but I did go over with her some details that I have not shared here, mostly about my continued recovery and how my life has improved considerably, even to where it is considerably better than before we had first met. I have said this here before, but not only have I lost a lot of weight – I now weigh about what I weighed forty years ago – but I am much more happy and even my wife says I’m a “nicer person.”

One thing that Maria said, that really makes me happy, is she now thinks that “somehow we were meant to be together in some way.” So now we are and will continue to be together.

Dedicated mass transit rider

Early DART suburban bus

I have used transit on a daily basis for over 37 years, in cities all over the world including Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Washington D.C., New York, Tulsa, Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, Boston, Atlanta, Toronto, London (England) and other cities.

After spending two years in the mid 1970s at Fast-Tax learning to develop computer software using PL/I, I took a new position with the consulting firm Cutler Williams in order to work at Lone Star Gas Company, north Texas’ natural gas utility. Most companies at that time wrote their in-house applications in COBOL, which had been based on work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as “the mother of COBOL.” Very few companies used PL/I, a programming language developed by IBM in 1966. Since that was what Fast-Tax taught me to use, working somewhere else meant I was limited locally to only a few other companies, specifically American Airlines, Rockwell and Lone Star Gas. Working at LSG also meant I would be working in downtown Dallas, just a few blocks from the Federal Reserve Bank where my father worked for more than 30 years. One benefit of working downtown was being able to ride the bus to work. Mass transit in those days was operated by the city and was known as Dallas Transit System.

Back in 1977 DTS only served the city of Dallas, not any suburbs. That meant I needed to drive five miles from Carrollton into Dallas to the nearest bus stop. (Soon my riding the bus would allow us to not need two cars and so Jean often drove me to the bus stop; eventually DART would bring mass transit to the suburbs so I would be able to walk to and from a bus each day.) In the 70s the only way to ride the bus was to pay in cash each time I rode. Six months after I began working downtown DTS started offering a monthly pass which cost about 90% of what it cost on a daily basis, and Lone Star Gas, through a program offered by DTS, covered another 25% of that.

Then on August 13, 1983 voters in Dallas and several suburbs created Dallas Area Rapid Transit to build a regional transit system. Soon express bus service (see photo above) began running between downtown Dallas and the new member cities of Addison, Farmers Branch, Flower Mound, Glenn Heights, Irving, Richardson, Plano, Rowlett and Carrollton! Then I only had a 2-mile drive to the nicer, larger, much more comfortable express bus.

Jean had a cousin Beverly Davidson who also worked downtown. We often talked about her riding the busses that now came out to Carrollton, but like most people she could find many reasons not to use them. Then one day she had the battery stolen from her car while it was parked downtown. That night she called me and asked if I could teach her how to ride DART. The next morning we met at the bus stop in Carrollton and caught the bus for downtown. This happened to be a day in the 1980s when Dallas had a not-rare-enough winter ice storm and the bus was not able to use the I35E expressway, because so many cars had slid around to block the roads. Instead we came down Harry Hines Blvd. Even with that alternative route, it took us nearly two hours to reach downtown. Beverly and I were sitting near the back of the bus and after more than an hour in the bus, she – along with a lot of other riders – was at the point where she needed a bathroom break. Even though she was very shy about going up to ask the driver, her need was great enough to require the effort. Understanding the situation the driver pulled over at Walnut Hill Road to allow riders to get out to use the nearby 7-11 for relief.

Not confounded by the bizzare circumstances of that bus trip, Beverly continued riding transit to work for many years after this.