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Photo by: kerwynmcc. Some Rights Reserved.

Over the holidays, I came face to face with that old axiom that trouble comes in threes. I experienced my first ever flat tire. Because of a cold snap in the city, my AMA membership did not really help out as the phone lines were jammed with people asking to get towed, batteries restarted, and those general types of automotive assistance. Therefore, left to my own devices, I was able to change my flat in the bitter cold.

Secondly, my laptop decided to crash. I have been without it ever since. It is terribly frustrating when you have your entire life on a device and then you must go without it. Mostly I am upset because I have been unable to keep up with all the podcasts that I subscribe to. I know, it is a tough life.

Lastly, and the one that leads into the story I am about to tell you, the heater in my aforementioned car decided to quit. This was when I was halfway to my parents’ home who live in a town about two hours north of the city. In the less than warm weather it is not ideal to go without a heater. I drove with a scraper in one hand and hope in the other.

I am not a mechanic; I definitely have never pretended to be nor will I ever be. Luckily, I have a father who is. He did not have the necessary part to fix my heater, but figured that the scrap yard would probably have the correct part. It being the holidays, we had to wait a couple of days for them to open and drove in early, through light flaky snow that had decided to fall.

What we encountered can only be described properly in an analogy. If anyone has every seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre then you know about the creepy family that the unfortunate people meet on their way to wherever they are going. We walked into the shop to find an ancient, bent over man in overalls and a baseball cap. Hard of hearing and obviously rheumatic, the hunchback wobbled over to us trying to figure out what it was that we wanted. Flustered, he let us know that nobody would be able to help us for another thirty minutes. He then proceeded to have a hacking coughing fit all over my dad. I inched over to the left.

The rest of the gang filtered in over the next few minutes. There was a huge mountain of a man, who I decided to nickname Mumbles, mostly because I have no idea what he was saying ever, and a couple of older women who just generally seemed confused about being there. They tried to find out information on ancient machines which I am pretty sure were running Windows NT. Fed up, my dad and I went in search for a vehicle that somewhat matched my own in the frigid air. As luck would have it, we did not have to go very far.

Hunkered under the hood of a rusted beast in the twilight of the morning, I held a flashlight that barely gave enough light as my father cut his hands on the frozen cables. After twenty minutes we were finally successful in procuring the part that we needed and I forced myself to pay the outrageous fee that Leatherface’s family decided to charge me. I could not help but wonder how I had got to this point. I have a University degree and was now living a scene from Deliverance. I hoped that I did not hear the squeal of a pig.

Knowing that it takes me two hours to get back to the city, and that I needed to be at work in three, did not inspire much confidence. Luckily my father’s skills really did pay the bills and he was able to change the part in just over forty minutes with minimal swearing.

I was able to breeze into work only a couple of minutes late. I feel like I escaped with my life, even though my mortality was never in peril.

I suppose the moral of this story is that small towns are full of inbred hicks. That is a fact. I also know that small towns also have remarkable people who can do incredible things that us city folk sometimes cannot. My dad is one of those people.

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