(Scene: On Wednesday, Mamie is driving a minivan pulling a rental trailer, jammed with consignment furniture that didn’t sell, on the road toward home, 900-miles away. She and husband Solly are rehashing what happened the day before.)
Mamie (singing the first phrase, then speaking): On the road again … glad it’s Wednesday … view out the back hasn’t changed …
Solly: The rental trailer blocks seeing anything but reversed print trailer warnings in the rearview mirror. Have to see traffic through the side extension mirrors. Yes, Tuesday was bad.
M: Some unique, twisted-psyche German word describes everything going wrong.
S (pronounced Shah’-den-froy-duh): Schadenfreude. Means taking joy in the misery of others. The gods must have been laughing.
M: Maybe we jinxed Tuesday when expressway traffic meant we picked up the trailer 40 minutes late.
S: Plus, the original trailer place called. Didn’t have the trailer.
M: Had to navigate around a million potholes to find a new place with no sign and a barely readable, heavily urban address.
S: Those trailer employees didn’t know how to hook up that heavy trailer or what to do with that third cable, the brake cable. They thought it optional!
M: They draped that cable over the hitch top like a tarnished tinsel garland thrown over a Christmas tree.
S: Hunkered down on the hot asphalt, we showed them where to hook up the brake cable.
M: Arriving at consignment, we met that great Davido crew we’d hired to tie furniture down inside the trailer.
S: Davido saw the safety chains dragging on the concrete, sank to his knees, muttered something in Spanish about sparks and the gas tank, and fixed everything.
M: Before we left, I marched into Consignment to find that mirror missing from the inventory. You’d have thought I was speaking Martian without a translator.
S: As you left, I realized the van’s right rear tire had lost pressure. I pumped life into that tire. It bled out that much air by the time you returned.
M: I said, “Fill it again and find us a tire shop.” You navigated. I swerved around potholes in urban traffic in this loaded 35-foot-long horror show.
S: First tire place we’d found was out of business. Second guy I called said he could get to it in two days. I said I needed a recommendation for same-day service.
M (RYBiT pronounced “ribbit”): Thus, you called Eddie, Manager of “Retire Your Bad Tires.” RYBiT for short. Eddie said RYBiT would help us. When we got there, RYBiT mechanics said they didn’t have time.
S: We played the Eddie card. The mechanics jacked up the bad-tire side of the van, trailer and all, and stared.
M: There was a 10-inch split in the tire…on the inside.
S: The RYBiTers filled up the bad tire. They disconnected the trailer, got the van up on a lift. The left rear tire also showed signs of splitting. The front two tires were worn.
M: ‘Replace ‘em all,’ said you. “RYBiT,” said I, Rosie the RYBiTer.
S: Tire employees left pronto to get replacement tires.
M: Turns out the replacement tire place didn’t have the right tires. The tire trackers located other replacement tires. Hours went by.
S: You didn’t care, Mamie. You were catching up on your reading.
M: I’m behind on reading, Solly, because I’m always driving.
S: I do my share of the driving. You refuse to learn how to navigate.
M: I navigate well with a map or the GPS. The gods running the phone navigation system don’t speak any language I can understand.
S: Eddie eventually brought cold bottles of water to cool us off before telling us expressway traffic was totally stopped, but the replacement tires would still magically appear any second.
M: Six hours and $600 after arriving, we rolled out on four new tires. I was driving a rig the size of a wheeled brontosaurus with extension side mirrors and no rearview mirror while trying to change lanes in rush hour expressway traffic.
S: No stress there. You deserve the Angel of The Highway recognition reward, Mamie.
M: We were barreling west to pick up those 40-ish boxes we’d stored at our son’s house. The horizon ahead looked weirdly dark.
S: I checked my phone. We were driving into a tornado warning.
M: The wind gusting was really shaking the van.
S: I said, “Drive faster, Mamie.”
M: Pedal to the metal, it was. And just as we finally got there, those ear-splitting tornado warning sirens went off.
S: Wind was blowing so hard it threatened to rip off the open car door.
M: Our son, his long hair streaming out behind him in a horizontal line, ran out and was yelling over the wind, ‘No worries. Our tornado warning is over. Those sirens are for the next town.’
S: Schadenfreude, for sure. The gods, the tire manager, and the staff were all seriously entertained. At our expense.
M (happily): But we’d missed our tornado. And now I’ve been christened “Angel of the Highway.”
S: I had a weak moment.
M: In your dreams. RYBiT.
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