“These are the times that try men’s souls.” I’ve heard that quote many times and if I had the inclination, I’d look up who said it. This morning (as I write this), I have neither the inclination nor the energy.
There are plenty of jokes written around what constitutes an old country music song. You know, the old trope of your wife leaving, taking the dog and taking the home in the process, but at least you’re still left with your trusty old truck.
Sometimes life imitates art too much. No, my wife hasn’t left me, I don’t have a dog (a couple of cats, yes), and I still have a home. The truck, though . . . . It just seems like this year has been the very epitome of that old “Hee Haw” skit, “Gloom, Despair, and Agony on Me.”
Wednesday, July 16, was the capstone.
So far this year (and last year, too) I have been out so much on car repairs on our aging fleet that it’s a running joke between me and the repair shop that I should be getting frequent flyer miles with them. A quick recap of this year’s auto repair bills so far: a transmission rebuild in my pickup in January, followed by eight new tires across three vehicles, new rotors and brake pads on the pickup (that I put on myself to save the labor costs), a new radiator on my daughter’s car, a new water pump on the van, a new heater door actuator in my sons car (only to discover it’s going to need a new HVAC control head unit), a new starter on my son’s car, two new batteries, and new front rotors on the van. I think I’ve forgotten something in the list. That’s certainly possible. Windshields are cracked on two of the vehicles, but that’s just going to have to wait.
And now, as if the year needed a crescendo, I’m likely looking at needing a new engine put in the truck. The noises it started making the last two weeks have me and the shop believing that after 278,000 miles of service, this engine is most likely done.
Have I mentioned the newspaper business is not exactly the cash cow it was 20 to 40 years ago?
Now, about yesterday. I drove the truck to Red Bay, the engine chattering and clattering the whole way (and the torque converter considering giving up its ghost, too, I believe). I covered the city council meeting and then went out to Mom’s house to visit her. My work life being what it is I don’t get out there like I’d like to or need to. Anyway, we’re sitting in the living room and the TV news is on. A brief weather segment comes on and the guy mentions the only real precipitation in the region being a rain cloud over Franklin County. I didn’t have my glasses on, so I didn’t catch the location. I didn’t think much of it – until the bottom started falling out over Mom’s house. Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but yesterday I had a truckload of boxes of magazines for a real estate company in the back of the pickup, my intentions being to take them to post offices the next day or two to get them shipped out. So, I had to race out of there, pushing the truck much harder than I wanted to while knowing its engine and likely the torque converter are compromised. Long story short the boxes were wet, but they dried out on the trip back to Tupelo, with the magazines inside unharmed, so there was no harm done. But still.
I parked the truck. It’s sounding like it’s on its last legs. I know it’s done moving until I take it back to the shop. I’m flustered and frustrated with that.
Not long later my wife notices our cat staring at something in the backyard, and then he jumped back. I went to check out what was going on. I initially couldn’t see anything and then there it was, less than three feet from me: the cat had been spying a bunched-up copperhead in a cleft of the retaining wall, and it was literally within striking distance of me. I didn’t have much choice; I pulled my pistol and fired into the wall. The snake rolled off into a thick patch of grass below and vanished. I fired another round or two into that patch to rustle it out. Long story short it’s really hard to shoot a moving snake (heading toward our back porch) from 10 feet above and away with a 9 mm, but I was finally able to nail it. Neither I nor the cat had been bitten, so the situation worked out about the best it could – well, except for the snake.
Here’s the crazy part of that ordeal. About an hour earlier, after I’d run out from the rain at Mom’s house only to be greeted by another cloud dumping rain near my house, I sent my younger sister, Jana, a picture of the cloud at Tupelo, saying I guess I was just snakebit with the rain and the magazines in the bed of the truck. An hour later I came fairly close to actually being snakebit. I told her to remind me to never use that phrase again.
Less than an hour later my daughter calls. She said she’d been run off the road by a car coming into her lane and both tires on the passenger side of her car were losing air badly. Another long story short, I wind up putting her spare tire on in the mall parking lot at 10 o’clock at night and then putting enough air in the other two that had grass and rocks wedged between the tire sidewall and the rim in order to make it home, knowing that’s an issue I have to deal with today.
The year just keeps on giving. We still haven’t replaced our dishwasher. A power outage and the surge that preceded it about a month ago damaged it, and getting it repaired for the third time in five years is just not worth it when that money could go toward a new one. But therein lies the problem: With two car insurances due last month and another due the first of August, plus my son’s college tuition check needing to be sent in next week, there’s not exactly been any dishwasher money on hand.
The garage door spring broke a few weeks back, too. Those aren’t cheap.
I made a post on Facebook late Wednesday saying the day had just been like living in an abusive relationship wherein the other party yells at you, stomps out of the room, and then keeps storming back saying, “And another thing . . . .” Somebody commented that at least I was looking at it with humor. My response: It’s either laugh or cry, and crying gets old.
If I’m currently living out an old country song, I’d like to change that station. With my luck, doing so would short out the radio. The way the year is going, I don’t want to press my luck.
