BETWEEN THE LINES: FRIEND RELATES HOW ODD EVENT BRINGS OUT MISTAKEN ACCOUNTS

It was one of those events you think happens to someone else, somewhere else because it would be too strange to happen to you. It's the kind of thing you hear about on the news and even see in the newspaper.

How many people do you know who can say they've been inside a building while a car drove through? Now, I know several.

Angela, a friend from my college days, called this weekend to relate exactly that story. What happened to her was something that most people wouldn't imagine happening to them, and I'm pretty certain she feels the same way.

I had just seen a newspaper photo from the St. Louis area that showed a damaged garage after a trash truck burst through the structure because it failed to make a turn.

Angela's story isn't quite that complicated. It involved a car with failing brakes and a disheveled clothing store. While Angela was doing some after-Thanksgiving shopping with her family at an outlet store in Tennessee, a woman drove her car through the store.

Most people heard the rumble of the car as it edged closer to the building and moved away to avoid injury. Clothes began falling slowly off the shelves and racks at the front of the store, Angela said.

Days after the event, Angela called it surreal. No one was really sure it happened until it was over. And even then, they weren't sure how to react or what to say.

But it was an accident that had the whole town talking even before the debris had been cleared away. And the stories that spread were much greater than the actual truth of the event. Angela said by the time her twin sister, Melissa, talked to a co-worker later in the evening, the story had become gruesome. Apparently the embellished version that spread around town included doctors having to amputate a woman's leg after she was injured and had no hope of recovery. Actually she just broke her ankle. But that's just how things work in a little town where there isn't much else to do but talk to friends and neighbors. Besides, making a story up is better than telling that watered-down, truthful version, right? Melissa, Angela's twin sister, works for the company that owns the store, so she set the record straight among the townsfolk.

Growing up in a small town, I knew exactly how well those rumor mills work. News, whether good or bad, spreads like wildfire through the streets.

Nearly every office and workplace operates in much the same fashion. The stories that get started and then spread among the employees are nothing at all like the truth of the matter. But those stories fuel our interest in gossip and other people's disasters.

I grew up in a town where people followed emergency vehicles to accidents and people's homes just to see who might be carried away on a stretcher or taken to a hospital. Now, the fire trucks and hospital's helicopters travel by my house almost daily, and I pay little attention to where they go. As long as those sirens don't stop in front of my house, I feel safe. As long as the disasters strike elsewhere, everyone at home feels fine. Isn't that what we all think? Or is it.

Laura Johnston is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.