I’d heard that in the dazed few seconds that follow non-lethal accidents, people sometimes have visions.

And it happened to me in 2008.

In my stupor, I clearly imagined one of my grandsons who lives in Florida telling his teacher somberly that he would be absent for a couple of days. The teacher asks why and is told by my grandson that he has to attend his grandparents’ funeral in Mississippi.

Empathic, the teacher consoles my grandson by asking if his grandparents, presumed to be feeble, had been sick a long time.

And my grandson responds with the truth: “No ma’am. They were riding a rented four-wheeler up a long-forsaken mountain path in Mexico when my grandfather wrecked it.”

While the vision wasn’t real, the “mishap” was. We survived with some scrapes and hurt feelings — and rode on to the crest for a picnic with friends. We could see the town of Santiago below, the mighty Pacific Ocean and majestic clouds beyond. But I kept thinking how my grandson would tell it had things turned out differently.

As the new year approaches, I’ve been reflecting on the one about to end.

If anyone handed me a script at this time last year that accurately described what I really have been doing for the past 12 months, I would have scanned it, laughed and handed it back.

On Dec. 29, 2007, if asked where Mozambique was, odds are I would have known it was somewhere in Africa. In no way would I have ever known that Maputo was its capital, or that I would visit there. But I did.

As a replacement adviser for University of Nebraska students in a depth-reporting class, I flew first to Amsterdam, then to Johannesburg. It was summer here, winter there — balmy but not cold. Several days we marched ourselves (or drove) to Pretoria to interview refuges from the imploded and corrupt government of Zimbabwe and the individuals trying to assist them. We spent time with people who had crossed into South Africa, some by swimming the Limpopo River. A hundred years ago when Rudyard Kipling wrote about the Limpopo he noted it was crocodile-infested. It still is. That says a lot about conditions in Zimbabwe, now facing a cholera epidemic on top of everything else.

Certain things were expected on the Africa trip. We knew we’d be with some of the worst- and longest-suffering victims of inhumanity on the planet. Some things were not expected. For instance, after a couple of days it became clear that the best way to get to where we wanted to go was for me to drive the rental car. So I learned to drive on the wrong side of the road at highway speeds to places I’d never been before, all the while shifting the manual transmission with my left hand. I did knock off a side mirror. But it could have been worse.

I was also flagged to the roadside by highway police because I passed them at regular highway speed, not 30 kilometers per hour less as their conveniently portable signs indicated I should be traveling.

I met all the officers of the detachment and we chatted warmly. They were impressed to see an American driver’s license and we began what could best be called a negotiation. I don’t remember the head officer’s name. It could have been Blagojevich, but he was far more polite and agreeable than the Illinois governor. Anyway, we parted friends with me providing enough cash to buy lunch and a couple of beers for everybody.

The tumbling four-wheeler on the Mexican mountain wasn’t the only adventure on that trip, either. There was the hour-long jungle hike that turned into a five-hour ordeal when the trail was lost to the dense foliage of the rainy season. I’ve got no Indiana Jones in me, but there I was dangling on the side of a cliff 400 feet above the ocean.

Suffice it to say that because I had no ideas what 2008 would bring, I’m not making any predictions for 2009.

Most of it, if not all of it, I expect to spend here in my comfortable chair in my usually quiet office here in good old Vicksburg.

But I can’t say for sure and that, at least in part, is what makes life an adventure for me and, I expect, everybody else, too.

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Charlie Mitchell is executive editor of The Vicksburg Post. Write to him at Box 821668, Vicksburg, MS 39182, or e-mail cmitchell@vicksburgpost.com.