Last Thursday was supposed to be a great day. The Wife™ and I were headed to Gatlinburg, Tennessee for a few days with her sister and their family for some much needed rest and relaxation video game playing. I really needed a break, and the hardest part was just making it to Thursday afternoon.
With the Virginia tragedy still looming overhead, most of last week was a bit more frenzied than usual. Working in higher education in a PR department gives you an entirely new perspective on situations like these. So, by Thursday, I was ready to be out of the office. Tensions were strained as bodies were weary from answering media questions and attending numerous emergency preparation meetings. And then there was the bomb scare.
Like almost every other school it seems, ours was graced with numerous hoaxes at the end of last week, each handled with an entirely appropriate amount of seriousness. Needless to say, by 1:30 I was glad to be headed home, free of the frantic phone calls and overly dramatic coworkers squealing about possible arsenic-laced cookies and self-evacuations. So I raced home, grabbed Jonas and took him north to drop him off at The Farm™ for boarding. Everything was going according to plan, I was on time despite the rushed schedule. I was finally breathing a sigh of relief, thinking about the next few days of playing video games, enjoying a few beers dog-free, and being surrounded by some great scenery. I was ready to begin my vacation.
About a mile from the exit, southbound on I-71, my car started fishtailing violently, then rocking back and forth until finally producing a magnificent bloom of smoke and almost flipping over. I managed to get it under control and pull of onto a narrow shoulder to have my suspicions confirmed: blown tire.
Shaken but fine, I began to rush about, dodging semi-trailers and gusts of wind to get my truck up on a jack. Knowing full well that this had thrown, quite literally, a wrench into our departure time, I freaked. I could just picture cranky babies and grumpy family members, scornfully tapping their toes in anticipation of leaving. I was pissed at myself for blowing this tire (because that makes so much sense), and I was determined to not make everyone else late.
Well, as luck would have it, the jack was too short for the slope of the shoulder and I was too stupid to figure out where the release valve for the spare tire-pulley was hidden. As I waited for a serviceman to arrive, I cursed my stupidity repeatedly. Stupid for not getting around to buying those tires when I knew I was overdue. Stupid for cutting things so closely, time-wise. Stupid for not being able to understand inadequate Japanese owner manuals and poorly drawn diagrams of spare tires. Stupid for just being stupid about everything. Mentally, I had just sabotaged the entire vacation that I had worked so hard to get to. My heart was racing, and it wasn’t because of the tractor trailers whizzing by my head, less than 12 inches away, at 80mph.
What’s sad is that I knew I should be simply glad that I was alive. What had just happened was serious enough that logistically I could have ended up very dead, as losing control of your car at 75mph isn’t really a good thing. Instead, I was worried about making people late. And as I drove off with my spare tire mounted, less than 30 minutes after blowing the original tire, I still wasn’t thankful. We were hardly late, the weekend was wonderful, I feel refreshed, and only now is it finally sinking in that I could very easily be in the hospital instead. Somehow I need to find a way to suck less at this “being thankful” thing. Goodness knows there are people dealing with real tragedies this morning besides making five other people thirty minutes late. I need to figure this out. And I need four new tires.
