When I drive, hundreds of ideas course through my mind. I sometimes wish I could hear them recombobulated in the voice of a posh Englishman. It would be more entertaining than silently selecting, catching, and then holding the gems because I bet I miss a lot of great ones.
My best writing occurs far from a keyboard when I’m most rested and relaxed. It’s always been that way, and unless I am relegated to a non-driving status like my father was after his stroke, I expect driving and writing in my mind to be my legacy.
The move to a new home, some distance from the old one, sets me on course to pass daily by a small house our family lived in for a short period. I stare as I pass. The color is updated, swapped from standard late-seventies white to a pleasant modern-day green, but not much else has changed.
These were my most formative years. MTV was a new rage. All they played was music, and I could hear more musical accompaniments to my ideas in that era, probably because of that. I’m better because of it.
Each time I pass the tiny ranch, I envision myself in the driveway with my 1976 Pontiac jacked up on blocks, doing a backyard brake job— the blue steel K-Mart SAE socket set beside me. The tin box of sockets, the only tools I had left after a devastating house fire a few miles away, happened to be inside the trunk of the car and not on a shelf in the basement to be lost with everything else we owned, save for the jeans and plaid shirt I was wearing when I got the news.
Looking down at the floorboards of the truck I’m driving, I realize that my taste in fashion is unchanged, but I’m not the same person. That’s only because I’m a better version of myself because of life’s adversities.
I miss the simplicity of depending on a few mismatched sockets on the ground beside me to replace the front brake pads. I miss the sound of the light tap on the leaping chrome Impala emblazoned horn button my father had to toot to warn me he was pulling in for a sandwich. Wearing a new suit, the only one he purchased since the house burned down, he looked dapper.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“My brakes were metal-to-metal,” I said, using a term I’d learned from other shade-tree mechanics around my age, most with more experience and better tools.
“Good for you, saving some money. Don’t screw it up.” He laughed, walking back toward the house, reassured because I appeared to know what I was doing. But I didn’t. I was sitting in the gravel because I had no choice, no cash, and I needed to stop.
Necessity is the mother of intervention, my slightly modified interpretation of the original slogan.
My father appeared unaffected by the adversities, but that was his job—to show us that we needed to move past the problems, put on a new suit, and get after it.
One thought became another, and I do not know why mopping the morgue at St. Joseph’s Hospital entered the chat. You don’t control the flow of thought or the process; you are simply steering the vehicle, letting your mind meander.
I was fifteen, walking down the dimly lit hallway pushing a galvanized bucket on wheels, steering with the wooden mop handle, feeling the same trepidation I felt the day before and the day before that one.
I pushed open the steel door, reaching in quickly to flick the light switch on the right side, hoping that nothing undead would grab my arm. Once safely inside, unimpeded by the occupants, I gave a cursory sweep and a mop.
I kept my back to the bare concrete wall, frontally facing the stainless steel refrigerated drawers holding everything I feared, simply because I’d watched too many horror movies. An unexpected frontal attack of the undead would be better faced head-on.
The attack never came.
Little did I know, much later in life, that I’d spend an inordinate amount of time in a room like that doing a vastly different job. Holding only notebooks and no mop, observing and jotting down observations within the stainless-clad basements permeated with the same odors I’d become accustomed to at fifteen.
I now realize that I’d been prepared for the next phase. The fear of being grabbed by the dead transitioned over twenty years into me being entirely comfortable with everyday contact with the same. Sitting in rooms with dead bodies was so commonplace that it became a routine activity, not unlike standing around in a room with a coffeemaker talking about widgets at any job. It was so common that I often explained to new co-workers that they would get used to it, and I meant it.
It’s just that I was immersed very early, that’s all. You can’t see the future but can look back and understand why it happened.
I am a product of being better because of it. It took me a long time to process that.
I pulled into the new dooryard and noticed that my unattached snowplow had sunk into the soft gravel, which needed grading but was far too wet. I found my small floor jack in the cluttered garage and waded into the problem, finally getting the plow reattached to the front of the Ford and moving it to higher ground.
If you give it time, mud soon turns to dry gravel. You must give the spring sun time to do her job. I’ll remain patient—hindsight is an outstanding passenger; she doesn’t say much, but it’s worth listening when she speaks.
From the Jagged Edge of America, I remain,
TC
What made you a better person? Drop a note in the comments.
Thanks for reading the stuff. And thank you to all of you who have generously kept this train running with your ongoing donations to my BuyMeACoffee account. Writing for a living is more pleasant with supporters, and you folks are stellar. I appreciate you all.
Tim Cotton