Friday, I received some excruciatingly bad news, the details of which I am not ready to share aloud, yet. The news was delivered swaddled in the thick blanketing of kind words and hoping the best for me, while their actual meaning cut to the very quick and simultaneously sliced my feet off at their ankles and tore my still beating heart out of her chest, the messenger hugged me and sent me on my zombie way.
I immediately left the scene of the crime, heart in hands, crawling back to my home as my feet refused to carry me, packed myself a weekend bag and waited for Julie to pick me up. We ate sushi and hit the road. We got to Erin's house on an island in Charleston, and things began to right themselves. Our hostess is a marvelous tour guide, always knowledgeable about the best places to see, things to do, restaurants to eat. Plus, she is the queen of making fast friends of all she encounters, so there isn't a person she doesn't know, it seems, and of those people they all love her without exception. Friday night, we ate at an Italian restaurant downtown with big wooden tables that lent themselves to the family style surprise menu the chef created for us. The food, the ambience, the experience, the waitstaff, were the exact panacea to what ailed me (figuratively of course, as my health is not the real issue here) at that point. A little late night entertainment and then we went back home for a relatively early bedtime, because we had a ferry to catch at zero dark.
The next morning we packed beach cruisers on the backs of cars and headed to the dock where Capt Will, another who was happy to see Erin return with friends in tow, was waiting to navigate our crew through the class 1 wilderness of the South Carolina intracoastal. He was adorable in a way that reminded me of a debearded, slightly older, hippy leprechaun. And it certainly didn't hurt that he was quite knowledgeable about Biology, especially as it related to the local ecosystem. The water was pristine and the air was fresh in a way that cleared the head, but only long enough to allow a new tide of thoughts regarding my recent misfortune to rush back in. Half an hour later we were on Bulls Island and ready to ride around the entire island in search of sand dollars and sea shells. After nearly eight hours of bike riding and shell hauling, wind and sun burn, isolation from civilization and the fresh ocean fragrance had rendered me exhausted to the point where I almost had a silent clarity in my mind. While my ischia are still recovering from the first bike ride I've been on since my tragic triathlon accident of 2002, my heart and brain and soul are so grateful for the release and relief that this excursion brought. Plus, we scored some pretty sweet souvenirs from our search efforts.
Casual dinner at a taco truck turned sit down restaurant and an introduction to the series House of Cards finished saturday off. That night I slept like a baby.
After a Lazy Sunday, we headed back to Jacksonville. The low tire pressure signal came on in Julie's car. We stopped, she added air, there was a bit of a bubble on the tire, but we pressed on, mindful to keep an eye on it. About an hour and a half later we stopped and repeated the process. Less than a mile later we heard the loud flappety report that the tire had gone completely flat. Julie expertly crossed the three lanes to the right shoulder and called roadside assistance as it was raining, and we didn't necessarily want to mess with the tire change when it was covered by insurance.
Then we got the text from the tow truck driver: he wouldn't arrive for another hour. The girls sprang into action. Wearing skinny jeans and light billowy cream colored shirts, she in high wedged sandals and me in flats that may as well have been bare feet, we set to work. We moved everything out of the trunk to the back seat, opened the well and lowered the full size spare. It has been nearly a decade since I changed a wheel solo, and probably 3 or 4 years since with my ex doing only a nominal amount of work, I changed a wheel with help. I feel fairly confident in doing what must be done even without recent experience in the arena. But Julie fortunately had recently changed this tire and was not only familiar with the process but is an expert about her car.
We propped the car up with the jack no problem and had all the tools we would need for this quick change. The only difficulty we really encountered was the fact that neither of us had on thick soled shoes-boots or even sneakers would have really been better footwear for this scenario. Neither one of us are hulking brutes, although we are both pretty strong in our own right. We both gave a turn at the wrench, but these arms were falling short of the task of loosening the lugs nuts. Each one of us then took a turn at standing on the wrench, I guess the fact that the lugs still didn't want to budge was a testament to our fitness? (Sure, why not, silver lining, half full, rainbows and unicorns.) With sneakers on we would have just kicked the wrench and that would have loosened it no problem. The car's owner was determined that she was not going to let five tiny lug nuts defeat her, so she repeatedly jumped on the wrench until she finally achieved victory in the form of a little budge in the first lug nut. She had loosened three or four of the them when two young gentleman pulled over and offered their help.
They, with their thickly (though not particularly cut) muscled arms made quick work of the tire change, and Julie (with minimal assistance from me) strapped the flat tired but up under the car. In the waning moments of the tire change, another car stopped. Out floated a tiny leprechaun of Asian descent, wearing a tweed jacket over a green crew neck tee shirt and bearing a small black umbrella. He glided up to us and said, "I noticed you didn't have an umbrella." The four of us who had been out there for less than ten minutes had not noticed, as the rain was barely heavier than a mist at that point. In fact Julie replied with a laugh, "Actually we have two, but we were so busy we didn't even think of it!" He stood above the young man who was tightening the lug nuts on the newly installed wheel, as he rightly wanted to protect the person doing the yeoman's work from the elements. I looked over at him and could read a portion of the caption on his saint patrick's day themed shirt as it was revealed by the opening in the top of his elbow patched smoking jacket; it read "Keep Calm..." and no doubt obscured by the buttoned lower portion of the jacket were the words "...and Carry an Umbrella." The wheel was on and we began to clean up the tools and lower the car. Our parasol provider looked around and said "seems as if you've got it under wraps."
And with that he was gone, with a tip of his umbrella.
A minute later after a brief inspection of their handiwork, our gentlemen helpers were also on their way.
Less than fifteen minutes after stopping, we were back on the road.
The moral of the story is twofold: b!tches do be doing it for themselves, but it doesn't hurt to have a few extra man hands in the mix to make light work of a messy situation. And if you don't have the presence of mind to get the umbrella you DO have in your car out whilst performing a tire change in the rain, "Keep Calm and Call a Leprechaun."
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