And now, back to the theme of not being too crazy in your life:
The reason you should try to be a quietly normal person is so you don’t find yourself hatching the kind of plan I hatched last week where I corralled a 91-year-old man, a young woman that had just given birth and her ten-day-old baby into a car whose battery then died - all to go sit by a pond for an hour.
Especially you should not hatch such a plan when the 91-year-old man has pain issues, the baby really has to eat soon and you are in a very public place.
Of course everyone was calm but me: Uncle Ed was calm because, God bless him and give him strength, he has made his peace with his pain. The newborn was calm because the newborn out cold, at least for the moment. And the new mother was calm because though she is new to this newborn, she isn’t new to motherhood. And she has excellent mental health. And she is well accustomed to these scrapes, having had me for a parent all her life.
After we realized the car battery was as dead as last week's corsage, Uncle Ed began whistling softly, Carrie went to sit on a nearby bench and consul the long list of Calls She Would Like to Try Making While the Baby Is Sleeping, and the baby herself snoozed on.
It was all I could to do gurgle out a single sentence, my throat constricting in panic:
“We have to call a tow truck!” I squeaked.
“Just call AAA,” Carrie called over her shoulder from her bench 20 feet away.
“AAA takes 45 minutes!”
"They only SAY they’ll take that long but they never do.”
“They do though! Sometimes they do!” I yelped, remembering the last time I was in a pinch like this (which you can read about here.
In the end I called Nick and Michael at the service station where I get all my car care, and within ten minutes they sent Jimmy, who gave us the jump, wouldn’t accept any money and insisted on taking a quick peek at the tiny sleeper in the back.
So maybe all really is well that ends well, but I think there might be a lesson for me in here somewhere. I mean a lesson besides the one about being thankful for the presence of angels in our lives with names like Nick, and Michael and Jimmy.
