My cousin, who lives in Decatur, told me a story one time about having a flat tire, out in the interstate highway someplace in the metro area. Not only was it on the right-of-way where people were speeding past at eighty-plus miles an hour, but it was raining. And in the dark. So she has developed the ability to be philosophical about minor crises as they pop up in daily life, like playing 'whack-a-mole'. Which pretty much goes along with my feeling of 'all you can do is all you can do'.
When I headed south on Thursday afternoon, tooling along on that crazy one-day trip to Valdosta I had a flat tire. In a little town just north of Albany, a fairly rural area, with lots of fallow fields that will soon be full of cotton, peanuts and soybean seeds when the planting season starts. There is a big peanut processing plant on the north side of town, where you can often smell the nuts being roasted as you drive along, as they are processing to make peanut butter. It used to be owned by the Cinderella company, but has been gobbled up by some big corporation in recent years.
I think considerable amount of nuts and products must travel by box car, as there is a multi-track line crossing the 280-520 highway there, between lots of big warehouses and storage facilities. As I was crossing over the tracks on Thursday, something flew up under my car, off the road, and went: wham! I thought: just some road debris, a stick, or a rock, or a piece of tire tread. But by the time I had traveled a block, slowing for an upcoming traffic light - I knew I had a problem.
I pulled over, to get off the street, got out to look: and discovered it was only flat on one side! I walked into the nearest office, and asked the person at the desk where I should call to find someone to fix my tire. She apparently misunderstood when I stated my dilemma - thinking I was expecting the rail company to come to the rescue. I told her I just needed a tire repair place. So she took me out the back door, and said go over there, down the street, around the corner. Which I did, and found Easy Pay Tire Co.
Mr. Easy Pay said that his service guy was out on a call, and could not help me. So I said: Call someone. He called a tow-truck guy, who came and replaced my flat with the wee spare, that was thinking about becoming flat as well. I got around to the tire store, and Mr. Easy Pay said his guy was not back, but he had some others who could look at my tire. We all looked, and it looked bad. A big hole. So he sold me a new tire,, his guys put it on, and I was on my way in less than an hour.
This sounds/appears to be a tale of woe. But in reality: it makes me realize that I have a whole lot of things in this scenario to be thankful for. Starting off with 'it wasn't raining', or dark, or on the interstate with people whizzing past going ninety miles an hour. I didn't get stuck out in the middle of nowhere with lug nuts that had been put on with an air-wrench. The guy driving the tow truck, though he probably enjoyed showing me his butt-crack, was polite, relatively fast, and fairly clean.
And only charged me $25, that I got reimbursed through the road service part of my auto insurance. I had the cash to pay him - that's pretty unusual in our culture of plastic cards.
The service guys who did the dirty work in the back of the Easy Pay Tire Co. were also very polite, fast., And thorough enough to offer to check the air pressure on the other tires, as well as add some to my donut-sized spare. Mr. Easy Pay assured me he had given me the 'good ole' boy' discount when I went to pay. Having a credit card I could put ninety bucks worth of new tire on is something to be thankful for, as well as the knowledge that I will pay the card in full when the next bill comes.
So though it was totally unexpected, the relatively minor crisis was nothing more than minor. For this I am thankful, as I am well aware of how dramatically, terribly different things could have turned out if I had hit debris while driving at full speed, going 65mph out in the country, and had a truly seriously disastrous disaster.
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