dianaschnuth

It was late Sunday afternoon when the Mustang pulled into our driveway. At first, I thought it was a contractor for a delivery company, but it turns out it was a young lady whose car had broken down.

Once she realized her car wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, she knocked on our front door and politely let me know. Since the temperature wasn’t much above freezing, I invited her into our home to wait for her tow.

It probably came off cringey instead of empathetic, but I told her about the time the transmission on my first car started acting funny. I was a good half-hour from home, and this was long before cell phones, so I ended up using a nice retired couple’s home phone to call my aunt for advice on what to do.

As I was telling my story, I could tell it wasn’t really having the effect I’d been hoping for, so I stopped rambling, gave her some space by the dining room window where she could watch for the tow truck, and went into the other room to continue folding laundry.

My aunt’s advice to me, once I finally got through to her, had been to accept the quart of transmission fluid the nice couple had offered me, pour it in, then drive home by way of every BP station I could find, using the gas card my stepdad Tom had given me to get another quart of transmission fluid at every stop along the way. I did manage to get to within a mile or so of home before the transmission fluid top-up method stopped working, and I was forced to leave my car at a local (non-BP) gas station and just stick a For Sale sign on the windshield. Eventually, a young man and his dad bought it off of me for $50 with the intention of fixing it up for the demolition derby at the county fair. Since the transmission only ran in reverse at that point, and that’s how they roll at the demo derby, it was a win-win for everyone.

Anyway, I hope that the young lady whose car happened to give up the ghost in our driveway finally got to go smoke with her friends. She certainly deserved some chill time after the weird evening she had, sitting in some Gen-X lady’s dining room waiting for AAA.