Roughly a half-dozen years after I had retired from paid employment, I heard on the local news a name very familiar to me. It was that of someone with whom I had worked for many years. This man was married, both he and his wife employed, with no children. They had in the last few years bought a rural home not far from where we live, theirs located on several acres of land, in a high-end community.

They were the kind of people who worked hard and played hard. He was given to almost-extreme sports; a board-sailing enthusiast, they went every summer for a sun-and-ocean drenched vacation to Cape Hatteras. He was also an avid mountain biker, going where no bicyclist in his sane mind would venture. He liked physical exertion with a hint of danger. Such people who court danger often find it.

He found his in an unlikely place; his own garage of his newly-acquired property. Of a spring morning, his wife had gone out for a run. When she returned she found her husband dead. He had been busy changing the oil in one of their vehicles, a van. Something had gone awry, the vehicle raised for the purpose at hand, had slipped off its mounts and crushed him against the garage door.

My husband always chose to change the oil in any of his vehicles over the years, himself. Many men do that. They consider it a relatively easy, useful intermittent task they can take on themselves. Undoubtedly it makes their wives nervous. It always did me. I had my husband promise, after the funeral of my work colleague, to take his vehicles in for such servicing and he agreed, in a sober moment of second-thought.

And he did, for a while, do just that. But then he sometimes remarked on the fact that he felt something had been done wrong, that the materials used by the garages who did the work, were not the right ones. His dissatisfaction led him to resume doing the oil changes again on his own, in our garage. The newer of our vehicles, a Mazda, he has agreed to let their service department do.

The older car, a Honda, was what he set about doing on his own this past Monday. I was most definitely not pleased.