Take It To The Limit

Episode 9

Stella Rose inserted the worn eight track tape to listen to Take It To The Limit, by her favorite band, The Eagles, as she gunned her 1971 Monte Carlo down a winding backroad on the outskirts of her hometown, Alamo, Georgia.

The song, epitomized Stella’s outlook on life.

Stella, now thirty, an ER nurse and a single mother of two boys, still lived life to the limit, at least in mind and spirit, if not in everyday reality.

Known to her friends as, “Bad Poodle”, Stella had pushed the envelope to the limit as long as she could remember.

Stella, always game for a dare, was the first of her gaggle of friends to climb Alamo’s water tower. Her spray painted message, “Bad Poodle was here!” - said it all.

Friday night bored, she once let the air out the sheriff’s tires while he ate his customary Friday night meal at Mabel’s Diner, before resuming his post football game patrol.

Stella topped the escapade, by writing, in lipstick, her signature, Bad Poodle was here!, across Sheriff Buck Rhodes windshield.

Whether she was jumping off the railroad trestle into the Oconee River, leading the charge to skinny dip at Wheeler’s Pond, or smoking in the girls room at school, Stella, the Bad Poodle Rose, never missed the chance to Take It To The Limit.

Stella, unwinding as she drove home from a long ER shift, popped her second cold Silver Bullet, imbibing as the 365 horsepower engine powered the Monte Carlo SS across the Georgia blacktop.

Another Silver Bullet, the 7:20 AMTrack to Savannah, skimmed, lightning fast, over the Seaboard Coastline rail above the Oconee River, approaching Alamo.

Stella turned up the volume, singing along as the Eagles song reached its crescendo, “Take it to the limit. Come on. Take it to the limit. One more time…”

The cool night air tossed Stella’s thick strawberry blonde hair whimsically from side to side.

Hearing the train whistle blow in the distance, Stella smiled, sensing it was time for Bad Poodle to take it to the limit one more time - like she had done so many times before on this same stretch of road.

In the aftermath of the collision, the train engineer told Sheriff Rhodes he had no time to break and that the driver of the Monte Carlo made no attempt to break.

Stella’s epitaph said it all:

Stella Rose

July 4, 1949 - June 25, 1979

Bad Poodle Was Here!

Take It To The Limit