Cold Spaghetti

What is the use in getting worked up? Everything about it is ridiculous. Cans are clanking under cars and rolling into gutters. Milk is dripping off my chin. Pausing for a moment, I realize I can hear my kids arguing in the house, 4 doors down. It IS absurd! I start to laugh.

*****

Something in our household equilibrium went array when Paul flew to Virginia for work at the start of the week. The whole sky had been falling on us for days, literally, so maybe the problems started much deeper? The basic balances of the entire city were off from the deluge.

Car troubles have been the theme of the week. The bottom line is that, at the moment, we do not have a fully working vehicle. We’re limping by with malfunction lights on through a sometimes-rough ride… it’s not clear whether it’s better to just trade the beloved station wagon in or get it fixed, and the work week was just too crazy for us to dedicate much time into thinking over it.

Then, this afternoon, after a wonderful morning, lunch, and playtime at Palmer Park Art Market, we tried to drive home and found that a tire on the still-broken car was FLAT.

Okay, then. I’m plucky and resourceful. So I start the work of changing a tire: moving all the holiday packages-yet-to-be-mailed under the kids’ feet, put the stroller on the sidewalk, and locating the spare tire and various tools. I was just setting up the jack when The Nice Guy walked by. In his early 40s, The Nice Guy knew well what a Man passing a woman with two small children does when he sees her changing a tire by herself. But this particular version of The Nice Guy is probably better suited to, say, assist in constitutional law review or maybe literary criticism. Changing tires? Maybe not. But chivalry is not dead, so just before reaching the end of the street, he spun on his heal and offered help.

To be honest, his outburst caught me off-guard. While I felt that not offering help most certainly presented permanent damage to his integrity, I paused to look around desperately for a burly Cajun man before admitting that I wasn’t in a position to turn away help. It wasn’t that I didn’t think I could change the tire. It was that I knew taking off the tire would be difficult… those big bolts? They are TIGHT. I know this from experience… this was not my first flat tire.

Being The Guy, he had to be the one to use the jack. I tried to show where it was to go, where I was trying to put it when he approached. He missed, the car fell, and took off a piece with it as it came down. *sigh*

When dealing with mechanical issues, how can a woman politely tell a helpful man just where he should help without insulting him?

Eventually the car went up. Then we had to remove the tire.

I ended up flagging down people to come and give a jump on the bar. Eventually all 5 bolts were removed, the spare attached, and the bolts re-attacked. It took more than an hour to change the tire. The Nice Guy definitely didn’t want to spend an hour with me out there, but despite my profuse thank-yous and repetitive assurance that he needn’t blow his whole day on helping me; he stayed to the end. Bless his intact integrity.

We drive away on 4 tires and directly push our luck to make An Incident at FedEx. Peanuts. Multiple trips. Sleepy kids. Bathroom emergencies. Leaving with no packages sent. (Note: this had nothing to do with poor behavior from the children; they were quite good, all thing considered.

Then the grocery store. There was a finger caught in a grocery cart. Then a lady freaked out when Kate stood up to re-position herself in the child seat.

And then, finally home, two bags of groceries burst in the dark, scattering cans of red beans into the night and exploding milk on the street.

Absurd. Hilarious.

*****

The black icing on this day was the loss of our beloved Saints, who seemed to forget up the appropriate start time for the game and missed the first half. Tragic, in the short term.

*****

But it’s okay. Paul will eventually emerge from the Northern Virginia thaw and come home. We have jobs and health insurance (hooray!) and dental insurance (double hooray!) and get to live in New Orleans. If that means that things go all wonky every once in awhile, it’s okay. We’ll survive it. Even with milk in our hair.