The First Automotive Miracle

I am watched over by Saints Click and Clack. The two experiences I can identify as miracles were both automotive.

Every parent with young children and a dodgy car tends a flourishing garden of mental dread at all times: a certainty that something deeply awful will happen to them in that vehicle. We had $1,000. We could throw that at the five thousand needed to fix the dead old Ford Taurus in the driveway. Or we could try to find something for $1,000 that at least ran. We found a very big, very old blue van, and we were always one tiny decrepit auto part away from catastrophe.

The kids were ages five, three and less-than-a-year old. The house was two years old. I had named the house Entropy North, and described it as "do-it-yourself Habitat for Humanity."

Although this seems unrelated—bear with me—a story about a local high school appeared on the front page of our little town newspaper. The gymnasium was finally getting renovated. I was at the construction site first thing in the morning, asking for the old gym flooring.

A lot of my house is reclaimed materials. I had my eye out for this kind of thing all the time. But something weird happens with wood flooring. When it's installed, it's necessary and desirable. While it's in the state of disrepair, or being torn out, or tossed in the dumpster, it's worthless debris. But if it has been lifted from the dumpster, even if nothing has been done to it, just that experience of resurrection transforms the wood into an antique, and it is priced accordingly. So if you have absolutely no money, and you want wood flooring, you need to be getting at it when it is in that middle limbo of needing to be tossed away and actually being tossed away, but before anybody else thinks of wanting it. And that's how we ended up with crowbars, prying out the free-throw zone every morning before six and every evening after five for a week. We had company: the Cuban American club had the exact same thought, but there was plenty to go around. And it's nice to think we have twin floors with them now.

Because this was a big project, we had borrowed an extra car so that we could tag-team. Because I had just unloaded a ton of flooring, the van was empty. Because I had paid the babysitter, I had my checkbook. Because the flooring was free, I had about $100 in my bank account. I loaded the kids into the van and went to pick up their father.

At a giant four-way stoplight by the mall, at ten o'clock at night, my nightmare began. The van just died. No engine, no electrical. The key went click and then nothing. Tots and baby slept in the back seat. The car blocked the lane, the mall was closed, no pay phones, long before most people had cell phones. It was very dark. Summer, so bus service had ended, although there was still plenty of fast traffic. I sat as the light changed through once, twice, wondering what on earth I was going to do. Getting the kids out and across the intersection was going to be incredibly dangerous. Then someone pulled up next to the passenger side and honked. Of course drivers were going to be pissed off at me, my car was blocking everything.

But good grief, it was a tow-truck. "Need help, lady?" The tow guy told me he could tow me right here, right now, as long as I could give him a check. One problem completely solved from out of the blue. I asked how all of us would fit in the cab of the truck. We couldn't, he already had someone with him. He had room for one. This was absurd: my five year old? Three year old? Baby? I guess we'd be walking in the dark for a while.

I had barely gotten my mind around this when I heard a little beep. In the dark, a car had pulled up close to me in the oncoming lane on the driver side. Windows rolled down, "Hi, are you guys ok?" And there was a family from church. The rest goes like the end of a nursery rhyme: the van got towed, the tow guy got paid, the friends got thanked, the kids and I got a safe ride home, and, in the borrowed car, picked up their father about a half-hour later.

Nightmares depend on certainty about the uncertain. You get crazy because you're so sure that the worst case scenario will be awful. But lots of times, situations you actually control become a train wreck, and complete chaos turns out to be fluffy at the bottom.