Simple Touch of Fate Magazine entry: "...Submissions should be true stories involving people who were in the right place at the wrong or right time."

As a sophomore in college I was used to wild fraternity weekends, where girls came and went through the house as quick as beer.

On one such occasion my girlfriend Wendy was especially imbibed and had grabbed a frat brother's bicycle. As she circled the house singing Madonna's "Holiday" I got tired of trying to keep up with her on foot, and decided to go see what the brothers in the house were doing.

Call it fate---call it bad timing----but as I walked into the back door a stereo speaker was falling out of a third story dorm room. I guessed my nut head fraternity brother Buxton had knocked it out the window as an accident!

But it hit me square on the top of the noggin, and as it did, the edge of it pierced the skin on my head.

Be hit on the head and you find that nothing on your body bleeds faster. I was quit surprised, having been born a C Student, that my brain carried that much blood! I fell into the fraternity house grabbing my head.

The problem was it was also Halloween Weekend, and many people were already covered in fake blood. In fact, as I walked by everyone yelling "help, I need somebody to take me to the emergency room" people laughed! They really thought I had poured a bunch of red dye on my head and was faking the injury.
Even when I said "I'm not kidding" people in the living room just pointed and smiled!

That was when I decided to run out the front door and wave down my drunken girlfriend and have her take me to the infirmary on the bike. After all, the college hospital was just a few blocks away.

And there she was...circling the house humming "...we need a Holiday-hey".

After riding 3 blocks on the handlebars then 8 stitches tot he wound---I decided I was really pretty lucky. The stereo speaker could have really hurt me, and I couldn't blame the bloody costumed frat brothers for not responding to my pleas!

I always kept that moment in my mind and decided to turn a negative memory into a positive one. In 2004 when I left a 16-year career at CNN, one of my colleagues bemoaned that I had NEVER missed a deadline. "...you have good timing," she said.

I thought of the stereo speaker head injury and smiled "...It's strange but...if you only knew," I shrugged!
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