Continuing on about "Guardan Angels"

Hi all and welcome.

I am not sure if any others have gone through these experiences because in all my 58 years I have noticed people are very reluctant to discuss this type of incident. Do we have a protector or Guardian Angel guiding and protecting us or is it simply pure dumb luck that has gotten us this far in our lives while others meet an early grave. What decides and how ? Or is it a preordained plan we are following and thus because of this we must be kept safe and out of harms' way. Well I have my belief and it is based on a series of incidences in my life which I have shared actually with very few people but I will try to tell them now.

The first incident to come to mind immediately is a time back when I was about 19 or 20 and I was out "cruising" one night in my favourite "pink Oldsmobile" a 1958 Oldsmobile. In the car was myself and two girls and another male friend. We were driving along Barton Street ( not really that important but I thought anyone from Hamilton could picture it better)and had had a few run-ins with one of those rich kid types in "daddy's car". for several blocks we had screamed profanities and insults at each other and had drag raced at stop lights. Then just as we passed Wentworth St going west he pulled up beside me and started laughing hysterically and making fun of the car I was driving. Now please picture this in your mind he is RIGHT BESIDE ME AT THIS POINT on the right hand side of me ! I don't know what happened but something snapped inside me and obviously without thinking I pulled the steering wheel as far and as fast as I could to the right in order to ... well I honestly don't know what I was thinking, running him off the road I guess but Christ almighty there were people walking on the streets and other cars and god knows what else he would have hit, and the damage to both our cars ... it was like the passing of the 15 cars - a moment of pure insanity but pull the wheel I did and got ready for the impact. But honest a god it never came. When I looked he was safely about 5 car lengths behind me. I remember being not only relieved that I had missed him but incredulous that he was not beside me any longer. When I quizzed the people in the car about how he had dropped so far back they were very non committal and never really gave me an acceptable answer. I have never forgotten this incident for if it had gone differently I would probably have been suspended from driving, maybe even put in juvenile hall for a while but regardless my whole life would have been ruined and all for a stupid one second of insanity. Many times over the years I have asked myself how did it happen ? How did he drop from right beside me and I mean absolutely right beside me to 5 cars back in an instant. To me and my daughter it is but one more instant of a guiding hand allowing me to reach this juncture in my life. Toward what final ultimate goal is yet to be determined but guiding me it is.

And now we switch forward in time to Christmas morning, 1982 I think (maybe 1981) and my wife, Carol and I are driving on the QEW a local highway leading from Burlington and Hamilton and we are heading back to Hamilton and it is raining fairly hard. We are driving my mother-in-law's Pinto. I am in the passing lane and am doing about 55 MPH's and decide to speed up to the speed limit which was 60 MPH's. Now please remember I had been used to driving fairly big cars like Lincolns and Oldsmobiles and the like so I really did not know how this car handled and how it would react to rain. Anyway I gave the accelerator just a little gas and then it happened - hydro planing of the worst kind. I totally lost control of the car and off we went in a free wheeling spin in the middle of a 4 lane highway. Now I had always been a fairly good driver, very sure of myself behind the wheel but what happened next is still a vivid memory and I still can't quite grasp an answer on what happened and why. All of a sudden the car and us was spinning madly out of control in the middle of the highway and I guess momentarily I had thoughts of this being the end. Well I remember actually being at a loss of what to do and almost in a state of panic when all of a sudden and without warning I looked up into the rear view mirror and saw us fast approaching a collision course with the guard rail and then, and I honestly 100% believe that someone or something took the wheel along with me and as calm as you may please I very calmly and assuredly steered the car - ALL THE WHILE LOOKING IN THE REAR VIEW MIRROR - away from the guard rail and when the rain drops had settled we had done not a 360 but a 450 + or - and were facing the wrong way in virtually the centre of the 4 lanes with what ever traffic there was very calmly steering around us and going about their business. I vaguely remember my wife and I looking at each other stunned momentarily and then starting to laugh that sort of nervous laugh of anyone who has had a close call and when the coast was clear I simply turned the car around and off we went. But the incident was never forgotten, not by my wife nor by me and I think it was a little more intense for me because I felt the 'whatever" take over with me and steer us out of danger. It was like an unbelievable calm had over taken me and I was no longer scared and simply knew what I had to do and did it. To this day I think about it and although the guard rail coming at us is not as vivid as the 15 cars and some of the other things it still surfaces every once in a while and I know for sure it will never be forgotten. Again saving me for what ? I always kid my daughters that if something had happened they would not be here and this was not in the stars. But I had avoided a bullet again.

And now we switch to a car lot where cars that are shipped in by train are unloaded from the rail cars and parked until they are ready for shipping to new car dealers. My job as you can probably guess was to un-chain these cars, drive them off the flat bed trains and then park them. It was not the most brain intense job I ever had but the money was especially good and I was coming off an early bout of unemployment so I was very thankful for the money. I had been doing the job for months without incident when suddenly one day while driving down one the rows I was in a head on collision basically t-boning a car coming at an angle of 90 degrees to me. Since we were only doing about 25-30 MPH's death hardly was likely however I could have got a nasty bump on my head when I hit the dashboard or the windshield but again this is where we must bend the rules of science and logic for not only did I not hit the dash board or windshield, I DID NOT EVEN MOVE FROM MY SEAT ! I HONESTLY DID NOT EVEN FEEL THE INERTIA, IT WAS SURREAL AS I SIMPLY STAYED EXACTLY WHERE I WAS AND LOOKED AT THE FRONT END OF MY BRAND NEW, DAY OLD HONDA ACCORD, smashed to smithereens. Again I have gone over this incident a million times in my mind thinking I must be mistaken but no I did not budge an inch from that seat and of course I wore NO seat belt. It really did not make an immediate impact as I was worried about my job having just smashed a brand new car and it was only later when thinking about things that I realized I had not moved. How to explain it ? I no longer try.

And lastly but certainly not least we are now driving on the Trans Canada highway traveling along side I think the Fraser River (not exactly sure what river it was) and totally enjoying our first holiday as we are on our way to Victoria to see our sister-in-law. It is our first holiday together and we are having a ball. And now we get to a particularly harrowing part of the road where there is a steep mountain on my right and the canyon drops hundreds of feet below into the rushing river below. It is beautiful but scary as well and I have both hands of the wheel just a little nervous. And looming up ahead is a flat bed truck empty save for a few pieces of wood or so we thought. My wife's has recollections of rail road ties but I remember it as being an 8 by 8, regardless the outcome is the same. As we are traveling along the most harrowing part of this particular road all of a sudden off the back of the truck comes bounding this large piece of wood. The 8 x 8 is bounding end over end and it is coming straight at us. We are approaching it at about 65 MPH's and it bouncing uncontrollably towards us. It is another one of those moments frozen it tiem. Now again to this day I will never understand what stopped me from steering to the left to avoid it and plunge into the Fraser Canyon probably never to have been seen again. I honestly have no idea why I chose the course I did but I simply accelerated toward the bounding piece of wood and hell be damned I thought.

Now let's think about what an 8 x 8 bouncing down the highway at probably 50 MPH's and crashing into your windshield. I figure death would be a pretty good guess or how about just smashing your windshield to pieces and although not killing you destroying the car and ruining the rest of your holidays and maybe even you life or how about this, how about ... simply hitting your thick rubber front bumper, splintering into a zillion pieces and bouncing innocently into the canyon below. Well obviously teh "log" chose the latter and sometimes late a night when I see the 8 x 8 coming towards me in my dreams instead of accelerating I do the natural thing and swerve left and plummet into the canyon below ... as I awaken in a cold sweat I think back to that day and thank whoever or whatever .. we made the right decison ... or was it really mine to make ?

Anyway thanks for listening
Don Barone

Very Quick Update

Hi all and welcome.

This is just a quick update to let you know I am still around and have not abandoned this site already. I am busy working on the transfer of my tapes and it is very time consuming. For example first you must burn the tape to the computer. That takes 2 hours since it burns in real time. Then you have to burn it to a DVD. This takes the better part of an hour and occasionally it malfunctions which means you have to try again. So, so far we are at about 3 - 4 hours. Next we have to take the original burned file on our hard drive and transfer it to FLV format for streaming on my webpage. This takes about 40 minutes, sometimes more. So all together each tape takes about 4 1/2 hours to transfer. As I said very time consuming and at any time one of the stages could fail at the very last second and you have to do it again. There are some tapes that have taken me 3 tries to get it right.

Anyway I am up to Tape 008 with Tape 009 being burnt as I type this. ... Well only about 340 more to go ...

So long for now and thanks for listening
Don Barone

An Interlude: Annnouncing A Major Project Undertaking

Hi all and welcome.

I am taking a quick break from finishing my explanation of "The Kundalini" and my experience with one in order to mention that I have begun work on probably my most ambitious web site to date and it doesn't get more challenging than this. Over the last 20 years I have video taped almost, well heck let's forget the word 'almost' and just say every, everything my two girls have done be it school plays, dance recitals, practice for dance recitals, live theatre group work they have done, visits to amusement parks, all family birthdays for ALL of us and virtually every get together our family has ever had. It totals somewhere around 150 video tapes of 2hour length duration. I have been meaning to put them all onto DVD but then I thought gee whiz that would simply make it 150 DVD's so I have come up with an alternative plan. Each 2 hour tape recorded in high quality is going to be around 7 GB's of data. Multiply this by 150 and we have about a Terra Byte's worth of recording. Now since the price of these large hard drives is falling I have come up with another plan. I am putting all my videos on a personal website, open to anyone but really meant for friends and family. In order to do this of course I have to download it onto my hard drive, convert to .flv and then post it but all the data will be on my hard drive so when the time comes I will simply buy 2 - Two Terra byte (2000 GB's) drives. One will be for Angelica, my oldest and one also for Marianna. On these two drives will be all 150 tapes in both .mpeg and .flv formats. The original tapes I will suggest go into a safety deposit box as a hedge against some future calamity. Although the 2000 GB drives are about $699.00 at the present in a couple of years I would think they will be around 299.00 and that I will be able to afford. Well rather than just talk about it why don't you take a visit to the site by clicking here:

We Grew Up Barones

Please be advised that there are some pretty boring moments on these tapes but my idea all along, for the last 20 years was to build an archive for my children and their children children's so in order to make it easier to wade through the quiet stuff I have also included an index on each tape. Please enjoy and all comments will be mostly appreciated.

Best wishes and thanks for listening.
Don Barone