The most recent time that I visited New York City was the summer after my senior year of high school. This is strange, because I have a lot of connections to the city: a good friend of mine who now lives in Pittsburgh is from Brooklyn, another close friend recently moved to NYC and is now the receptionist for a New York personal injury attorney, another friend lives there now as a photographer and temp worker...I’ve passed through, on my way to Boston, and I keep wanting to visit the injury attorney receptionist friend, but there’s not the money, and not the time, it always seems.

But the point is, what I remember most from that trip now isn’t all the museums we went to or the shows that we saw, it’s an accident we saw happen on the street. I remember other things, good things, fun things, the Indian restaurants warring and dyeing our hair in the apartment and so on, but none so vividly.

Like I said, my friend works for a car accident lawyer. New York attorneys have got to be pretty well acquainted with this stuff: must be deadened to it, in fact, if you’re going to be any kind of successful as an accident attorney. I can’t imagine ever being numbed to what I saw: a woman crossing the street gets hit by a car.

I don’t know anything about NY accident law, but the driver was sure in the wrong. He was turning on a red light – the woman had the walk sign. But to be honest, I don’t know if she was ever OK enough afterwards to even get to the stage of dealing with an accident attorney or an injury attorney. She rose up with the momentum of the car, backed off, and stood in the street, looking mad as hell, as if she were ready to sock the guy in the face – and then she crumpled to the ground. It may be that no personal injury lawyer in NY even got the chance to look at the case.

I remember also on the drive up to NYC we saw a man, a highway construction worker, lying by the side of the highway. That too is vivid: orange vest, twisted legs, hidden face, toppled truck, nervous crowd.

But you have to imagine that these images which so stick in my head are common ones in the lives of, not just your average New York personal injury lawyer, but probably your average New Yorker. What must it be like to see an accident like that and think, “Oh, not again”?