Scared to Death

Dear Blog Reader.

I hope that this finds you doing well. I must admit that my hands are a bit shaky. I had quite the Halloween fright. It is hard to believe that we have passed Thanksgiving. But let’s face it. Thanksgiving was so early this year that I barely had time to recover from my Halloween ordeal. It was a wonderful Thanksgiving. It is over now and it is off to the next faze of the holiday season which I fondly call; Newthankschristgivemasday. It is a quiet Sunday morning. The lovely Miss Beverly has graciously made me smokies and eggs with one piece of heavy bread. What is heavy bread you ask? Well you will just have to keep wondering and hope that someday we will let you live with us and teach you the heavy bread secret handshake.

Oh don’t be sad. If you were here, you would have to smell my garlic infused fingers. I know that it is too late plant garlic. But what could I do? With Aug-toner temps being so high. It would have germinated the garlic. It’s green sprouts would have emerged and been frozen in Jan-peril.  Yes, you would be able to dream about pans of lasagna, and tubs of humus, but it would stink to high heaven. That is one thing that reading on the internet deprives one. If you were here and we were having a story telling conversation, you would be able to smell the garlic oils left on my hands after going out and getting  15 ft of garlic in the ground in hopes that the 50 degree weather forecasted this week will be enough to promote healthy root growth and not so much to promote sprouting. We shall see. That sitting around the table, telling and listening to stories, the lingering evidentiary aroma of a task well done, adds so much to the social discourse that is lost with social media. However, don’t even start to think that I am inviting all one million of you over for smokies and eggs for a story. 

All of that being said, I hope that my words can convey the terror that I felt while trying to change a tire at 8:00 p.m. along I69 during a heavy rain. Hopefully, you will not need to see my wild eyed gesticulating, or see me throw my glasses from my face while demonstrating one of the more frightening moments to get the flavor of the fear that I experienced that evening.

Bev and I were out celebrating our foster son’s good grades at Golden Corral. I know that some of you foodies out there are frightened by that sentence. Don’t be such a snob. Where else can you go and get gummy bears to sprinkle over your ice cream sundae? Pure goodness. And there is so much of everything. It is what J.D. wanted. “What J.D. wants”, has been in short supply as he learns to live under different management. We rolled out of Golden Corral and ran through the wind and the rain to the car. We jumped in the car and headed out for the 12 mile trek home. Just as I pulled on interstate, the low tire light lit up. 

That yellow light blazed on my dash and my adrenaline spiked. First, I hoped that the stupid sensor was malfunctioning like it had for nearly a year before I had it fixed. Crap! That’s right. I had it fixed. Plan B: maybe it was just signifying the regular loss of air that all tires undergo. Pump up the tire once a year and the light goes out and there is no problem. I would just drive the eight miles to the next exit, pull into a gas station and check it out. I would be relieved when looking at the tire and seeing that it might be a little low but drivable. I would pull into our nice garage and pump up the tire and be good for another 12 months. Crap! I don’t remember ever having to pump up the tire every once in a while before. That is the other car; the one with the 8 year old rims that may have a bit of pitting around the rim. Sure I have to pump it up every three months but never this car.

Well I wasn’t going to get out on the interstate to check. So, I pushed the gas down harder and and started doing mental gymnastics. If a car leaves St Louis and drives 70 mph toward Indianapolis 231 miles away and another car leaves Indianapolis and drives 100 mph, will the second car lose control if the tire suddenly goes flat? It turns out that at 70 mph you will make it about 6 miles before the telltale shaking will tell you that your story problem is over, and you did not make it to the safe haven exit number 25, and it feels like it is the driver’s side rear that is going down. Congratulations, you get to get up close and personal to oncoming traffic.

Like an Indy 500 crew going over the wall in the final laps of the race, the lovely Miss Beverly and I hop out of the car, open the hatchback and start digging for tires, jacks, and lug wrenches. The lovely Miss Beverly was a great help. She did a great job standing at the back of the car and shining the flash light around the corner at my work area.  During the next five minutes, I had three thoughts that kept passing through my mind in an eternal loop. First, how far will my body fly if someone drifted off the road and hit me at 70 mph? Second, it’s okay if I get hit but I am going to be really sad if the lovely Miss Beverly or the two children in the car get hit. Third, did you know that it has been scientifically proven that the hour between 8:00 and 9:00 p.m. is one of the 24 most texting-while-driving hours.

Then at the 5:03 minute mark, things got really exciting. I was just starting to tighten the lug nuts and exhausting my curing thesaurus when a truck came by so close and fast that it blew my glasses off of my face. Yes, BLEW MY GLASSES OF MY FACE!  And let me tell you, Roget’s was able to publish a new edition of curses. Thankfully my glasses landed in a crack between my coat and the car. I recovered, put my glasses back on, turned to page two of the new edition and really started tightening lug nuts. During this frenzied two minutes, two more thoughts ran through my mind. First, Bill Cosby (back when he was funny and a closeted abuser) had a bit that told a story about his mother always telling him to put on clean underwear because you didn’t want to have dirty underwear in the hospital. At this point, he looked at the audience and said, “we all know that clean underwear don’t matter. If you are in an accident, first you are going to say it and then your’e going to do it. It doesn’t matter how clean your underwear were.” My underwear were in great danger of being soiled.

Second, I thought why do people want me to watch the Walking Dead or a hundred other horror films. I don’t like them. They scare me, and at that moment along I 69, at 8:00 p.m. in the dark and the rain, fixing a flat tire 3 feet away from cars going 70 mph with the drivers texting and a foot and a half way from some S.O.B. in a semi, I received my lifetime supply of scared s#*%$t-less.

Take care.

Roger.