They Turned Around
It still boggles my mind…
I’m headed home from work on a chilly December afternoon, trying to figure out what I should have for dinner, when I sense an odd noise coming from the car.
Naturally, as is the way of things, I had just handed in my final payment on the vehicle a month ago. For a split-second I think, “Oh please don’t let there be anything really wrong here. Not after I just got the title and everything.”
I take a breath, reach for some kind of calm, and tell myself, “Just keep going. Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen.”
About three seconds later, it happens.
Oh boy, does it happen.
The “low tire pressure” light pops on, things start really clunking and grinding and I can feel the driving is way off. There’s a telltale thump, thump, thump that has a rhythm to it.
Flat tire.
It’s gotta be.
I know I have to get off the road and off the rim and hope nothing is seriously damaged.
The guy behind me, by this point, is riding my bumper pretty close because you really can’t do the speed limit with a flat tire.
Miraculously, the gravel parking lot of a water treatment facility comes up on the right so I turn in, put the car in park and get out to see what had happened.
There are pancakes and then there’s the rubber on that back, right tire. Yikes is that puppy flat.
Thoughts start firing off in my head in rather rapid succession.
Is my AAA up to date?
Doubtful.
Could I get online, update it and call?
Maybe.
Are the people at this water treatment place gonna be pissed that my car is parked here?
Things look pretty dark inside. Should be okay.
Can I get all this done before the sun sets?
Damn, I’m screwed.
So it’s at these moments that I come to the uncomfortable realization that for all my love of Jo Polniachek from the 80s sitcom, Facts of Life, I’m really much more like Blair Warner.
Ugh. It pains me to type that.
There are aspects of life that I’m good at. Writing. Speaking in public. Taking care of animals. I have some pasta dishes that I make that are pretty darn good. Navigating through new cities I can handle (although I have to give google maps a lot of the credit on that one). I can even be moderately successful at figuring out computer stuff.
But cars? From tires to anything under the hood, I got nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
If I were the aforementioned tomboy, Jo, I would have jacked that baby up, had the lug nuts off and the spare on in no time. (I’d like to give myself a little kudos for at least knowing the term lug nut, here.)
Instead, my brain conjures up useless Facts of Life trivia from the episode where Jo worked at the bike shop and her boyfriend was a male chauvinist pig.
No joke. It’s what I was thinking.
In my defense, I have been recently binge watching the DVDs my siblings got me for Christmas a few years ago, so the show is on my mind.
About this time, a car pulls in behind me and I switch gears from the Eastland School for Girls to how the hell I’m gonna tell the owners of this treatment facility that it’ll take a while for me to get my car out of their parking lot.
My explanations begin the minute their car door opens.
“I’m so sorry. I got a flat tire and this was the first place I could pull off the road. I’ll figure out how to get it fixed as soon as I can and be out of your hair. I promise.”
The head-shaking starts practically the minute I open my mouth. A young man and woman get out of the car and say, “We just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
This is the moment in the story where things take an almost unimaginable turn.
These two kids — I’m calling them kids because I find out later they are 19 and 18 respectively and if I’m doing the biological math, I’m most definitely old enough to be their mother — tell me that they were driving behind me and noticed I was having trouble.
After I had pulled into the treatment facility, the girl had looked to the boy and said, “We have to go back.”
So they turned around.
This is the part (I made it the title of this piece, after all) that even days later, I can’t really fathom.
They turned around.
They. Turned. Around.
They live an hour away.
They’re here to visit a friend.
Just for the day.
I don’t know them. They don’t know me.
But they turned around.
The girl told me (and this is as true as my fingers on this keyboard) that she “was just raised that way. To help people.”
I don’t think I had words at that point, other than a breathless, “Wow.”
The guy said, “Do you have a spare?”
I’m pretty sure my eyes boggled to deranged-Chihuahua size at that and I said, “You’re not asking me that because you’re actually going to put it on, are you?”
He shrugged and said, “Sure. If you have one.”
Therein began an experience on a random afternoon that was as humbling as it was awe-inspiring.
Those two kids actually worked together to use the jack that came with the spare in the trunk of my car to get that flat tire off, put on the donut tire and give me advice on how fast and how far I can drive on it.
At one point in time, I actually said, “Who ARE you people??”
They laughed and I equated them to the Avengers in terms of saving people and being heroes.
I think we can all agree that 2020 has been a pretty big shit show, all things considered. I know I struggled many a day in the last few months with feelings of anxiety, fear, anger, helplessness and depression.
I have actually started using phrases like, “Man, things were so much different when I was a kid.”
A sure sign of getting old, but also one that lacks hope.
As I stood under the cold, gray December sky that afternoon, while the kids yanked and tugged on those lug nuts, I remember looking up and thinking, “How did this even happen?”
I didn’t have to worry about calling a tow truck. I had my spare on, found an open Firestone, and the tire patched an hour later (no joke).
I barely had time to wring my hands in worry, looking at that flat tire before those kids pulled in behind me.
How did it happen?
It happened because the Universe really does have our backs. God, divinity, spirits, angels, whatever you want to call the greater benevolence, really does support us.
Because there are good people out there. Even young ones. Sometimes especially young ones.
Because for all the awful that we’ve experienced this year, there’s a whole lot of really good that exists right along with it. You just have to take a minute to pull your head out of the crap and look for it.
Because Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
Because it’s basically the tenets of our existence. The good and bad. The yin and the yang. One cannot exist without the other.
So when the days seem gloomy and you’ve got a pretty solid case of the 2020 blahs, remember these two kids. Remember this 18 and 19 year old who turned around to help a middle-aged, menopausal woman who’s clueless about cars because that’s “how they were raised.”
Know that they’re out there and there are many, many more like them.
And hold on to that ever elusive hope.
Because…they turned around.
