When I was 12, my best friend's dad, one of the very few hardcore cyclists in Boston in the '60s, told us that if we ever saw the side of a right turning truck in front of us we were soon to die. Not maybe. Many years later, a farm truck passed me and pulled into a farm store parking lot. I was looking at that truck side. It straightened out and I passed it on its right, shaken to the core. The truck had a passenger who screamed I was there. (I never heard the scream 'though I was 6 feet away.) The driver and I knew we had an angel that day.

The month was June. That fall two cyclists were killed by right turning trucks, one a college coed, the other an experienced bike mechanic.

Don't count on my angel being there.

Ben