I am walking with a painful knee this week. I was walking across the front room last week and stubbed my toe on the rug while carrying a haffa cuppa cold coffee. The cup hit Elsbeth in the shoulder and she got all wet.

I landed on my left knee and it meant I was lamed for three days. I can now walk by wincing and use a cane. I should be able-bodied in a week or two. I bruised some muscle under the kneecap I guess.

It is nothing compared to a life of amazing near misses

I was nearly killed by a prancing mountain bowling ball rock, dodged death by freight train twice as a boy who lived near the tracks in Portland beat drowning by half an inch, torn from my parents by car wreck that split our 1918 Buick in half, had a coronary bypass, sported a walnut-sized colon cancer, caught a whizzing golf ball smack on the butt, got a banged up noggin when bombed by a falling bucking bar at Boeing, caught in a wild tide change in a gale while salmon fishing and escaped capsizing by sheer luck, as a kid had earache and Mom put hot pearl onions in it. Made the martinis taste funny (I'm kidding here), suffered ingrown toenails, had a chunk of meat ripped from my forearm by barbed wire on a trip to Hollywood, floated down a river for a quarter mile in an unplanned test of a flotation jacket, was thrown into the Sandy river in Portland at age 7 by my own father never having learned to dog paddle, stung by yellow jackets, deer flies, hit by a 1927 Willys while pushing my brother in our steel wheeled go cart on Columbia Boulevard in Portland, had several root canals and IBS (Irritable Brother Syndrome).

Once tried to go through a tall fir tree skiing at Timberline Lodge, one leg on each side that hurt a lot, had the molly grumps and the quickstep eating green apples at age 8, suffered a huge black eye from bully one when arms pinned back by bully two, nearly died when smacked on huge carbuncle in middle of back by another bully in sixth grade singing class at Woodlawn grade school in Portland. He said I was off key.

Once I was hiking up a stream bank on an island above Ketchikan when I was driven to my knees by a blow to the forehead. I had run smack dab into the end of a steel water pipe that had been left to rust out many years before when the resort we were visiting once piped in hot springs water. I bled like stuck hog, stumbled back the lodge which was not officially open and a caretaker poured a glass of Jim Beam on it. The scar is still there, near the one I got when the aforementioned school bully pushed me off a concrete staircase and my cheekbone was cracked.

I once got a bruised liver (don't all livers look bruised?) that put me in the old West Seattle Junction hospital for two days when I was 22. We were sledding, and my buddy's 5-year-old daughter was on my back. I forgot how to steer a sled and hit a ditch. She landed in a snow bank and was not injured.

I took three of our sons fishing in Lake Fenwick in 1948. I placed them on a log along the shore while I fished from a 9-foot dinghy nearby. I forgot about the six inches of freeboard and leaned over. Mistake. It capsized right in front of the boys. I swam to shore, and it destroyed our peanut butter sandwiches. I was freezing. The kids have never let me forget that misadventure.

I once took the ski lift up Mt Baker and discovered that the landing area was flat, not sloped down. When I jumped off I slipped backward and foolishly raised my head to look around. The chair lift seat conked my cranium. A real fun day at the mountain.

Closest call and miracle was the day wife and new baby, Mike and I drove our '33 Plymouth coupe to Martha Lake near Mukilteo. Traveling down a steep grade we hit a chuckhole and watched both front wheels without wooden spokes cruising ahead of us as we floated helplessly to the left barely missing a phone pole and smashing radiator first into a huge pile of freshly cut branches not yet removed by a county road crew.

The near disaster broke both headlamps but no one got a scratch. The chuckhole had broken the spokes out. I was able to find two used wheels and lights the next day and drove it home. It did not even break the hydraulic fluid lines.

How lucky can you get? Elsbeth and I were on a freeway near Boise following a flatbed truck loaded with two foot round cement paving blocks. The pavers were jiggling so we pulled over and passed it just as the concrete wafers came loose and were flying off the truck onto the highway rolling freely. We were on a curve so we never saw what happened to anyone behind the truck but it might have been curtains for us.

One other time we were on I-5 in Tacoma when we were following a big flatbed with huge crates of appliances. I was again leery of the bouncing load and got into the lane next to the truck just in time to watch one of the big crates fall off and land on the freeway, then bounce left into our lane, and spring up once more right over our car just grazing the paint. We watched the crate through the rear view mirror stop traffic on the freeway. The driver of the truck did pull over and looked at our scratched roof. He gave us his insurance company name. And we got a new paint job.

Enuff for now. Next week I will tell you how I got shot in the chest by a fellow golfer and some other weird narrow escapes.

Black Cloud is moaning as he walks to get more coffee and can be reached at publisher@robinsonnews.com