Tragical Hysterium

Saturday, March 6, 2010, is to the David Mahin Family something similar to a Day of Infamy. It started with the loss of a gas cap off the work van, the rusty, ugly Astro. Just a couple hours later, the 'Sunday go to meetin' van, (the pretty red Ford Windstar), decides its time to have tranny problems!?!? It only goes in reverse now. (Good thing Kansas' roads are really straight but I still have a crook in my neck .....) Then, last but not least, I DID THE LAUNDRY. Things went fairly well. It was a really, really, dirty load of cow barn clothes, (oh, that's right, I haven't mentioned my mission of mercy, with Davey and Doug, to a certain dairy farm family), well.... the clothes were 'cow barn' filthy so I reset the washing machine to agitate twice as long as usual. One problem. MY CELL PHONE GIVES ME A STEELY GLINT OF A GLARE FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE WASHTUB. No, not my cell phone. Forget about my car that only goes in reverse now but please not my cell phone too. I coddle and apologize over it but it won't have any of that. I try to turn it on but it only reboots itself 14 times a minute as if its throwing a royal 'poor me' fit.

Well, we drove the work van to church on Sunday. And because I didn't have the cell phone alarm to vibrate at 1 minute before church service time... Well, the pastor started 2 minutes late because the sancturay clock is not visible enough from the back of the church....... you get the idea, Sunday was NOT a good day. (Good thing the Good life has more to do with than just Techie things.)

Wouldn't you know, today, Monday March 8, while driving the work van all over Cloud county Kansas, the muffler system decides to literally break in half and begin to scrape and bang every single inch all the way across the Walmart parking lot, the BUSY Walmart parking lot, to the nearest empty parking spot. I'm sure the horrific noise turned many heads. However, this time, fortunately, I was NOT a part of this scenario. I was in my parents car many miles away--heading AWAY from the busy AND NOISY parking lot that my wife had just driven into. I was driving my parents away from my dad's dialysis treatment and, thanks to a borrowed cell phone that reported my wife's case of hysterical laughter in Wally's parking lot, I came to a full stop in a turning bay to conduct a conversation with my dad. "Dad, can I use your car to turn around and travel 13 miles back up to Walmart to see if I can get my work van to travel inconspicuously once again? Or do you want me take you home first? Just 12 miles away." (Dialysis is always hard on dad and often he just goes to bed once he gets home.) Bless his heart even though he was absolutely washed out from a hard day of Dialysis, his fatherly heart still yearned after his "car impaired" son, and after calculating miles, gas, time, and expense decided we should retrace our steps to Wally World and try to get the broken muffler fixed.

We started up from the turning bay, thankfully no one needed it for its intended use while we used it for our Father To Son Talk, and as I accelerated up the ramp that lead toward the broken muffler job, he turned to me and, no lie, asked, "IS THIS USUAL FOR YOUR LIFE?" I turned on the windowshield wipers to chase away the rain that had been falling for 2 long hours, "Yes, dad, the 'usual' of my life is that when it rains it POURS, then everything's good for a season and then out of the blue it just lets loose and pours once again. Yes, THIS IS USUAL."

The muffler does not drag now but it still obnoxiously roars its disgust of 293,000 miles every chance it gets. Is that embarrassing? By all means,YES. Better that though, than having a sore neck from driving looking over one's shoulder because a stubborn tranny will only drive in reverse.