Like a dog chasing a car, the truck’s wipers couldn’t keep up with the rain on the windshield. It was the hardest rainstorm Bobby Ray had ever seen in his 25 years — the sky was green and nickel-sized hail beat down on his already beat-down truck. If his truck’s radio had worked, he would know exactly how serious this storm had become. But he was clueless. He slowly eased his truck up to the traffic light at First and Main Street and stopped.
The pickup stalled, setting off a symphony of car horns behind it.
Bobby Ray looked at his dashboard light up like a Christmas display. He sighed — it had been one of those days. He looked over at his cell phone — which was dead — and he just wanted to beat his head against the steering wheel until he was unconscious. Like most things important to him, the phone wasn’t there when push came to shove. And he was about to have push and shove his truck.
“#$%#$% FATE! WHY DO YOU HATE ME?!?” he screamed in the cab. No one heard him.
Bobby Ray would be fired for being late to work at the Jiffy Pump & Save gas station. He just knew it.
He unclicked his seatbelt and checked his mirror. Three cars had already hurried passed him. There was no sense of him getting run over (although considering where the day was going, he wouldn’t be surprised.) He unlocked the door and tugged the handle. It broke off in his hand.
“#$%#$!” he shouted in his truck. Once again, no one heard him or cared.
“What a way to start off a New Year.” he grumbled. Late to work. His beater of a truck had died. His phone conked out and now he was stuck in this piece of #$%# truck. He crawled across the seat and tried to get the passenger side door open. It was stuck, too. Another car horn blared behind him. He motioned for the car to go around. The driver of the car shot him a bird. “Lovely,” he thought as he wrestled with the door.
He sat there for fifteen minutes shaking his fist at the sky and cursing his dumb luck. How fate had betrayed him. How it had slapped him in the face once again. And then, for no reason, he decided to try the engine again. The truck’s worn-out engine mysteriously cranked. And then it purred like a milk-fed kitten.
The rain had let up and the windshield wipers finally began clearing the rain away. He pushed in the clutch and eased the truck forward when the light turned green. The truck was running fine — why it had died was a complete mystery to him. He rounded the curve and headed toward the gas station.
But the gas station wasn’t there.
Instead there were three firetrucks, five ambulances and a couple of police cars. He looked over in the field and saw paramedics covering up a couple of bodies. And then he looked to where the gas station used to be and saw nothing but a slab and twisted debris. He grabbed the passenger-door handle and the door opened immediately. Soaked and stunned, he ran over to his friend Stan who was a Sergeant for the local police.
“STAN! What happened?”
Stan looked at him like he was an idiot. “Tornado, Bobby Ray. A big one. Roared out of the Southwest and completely erased your store from the face of the Earth. Everyone was killed. Looks like five fatalities in all. You’re a lucky man you were late for work.”
Bobby Ray dropped to his knees. He then looked over at his beater truck and realized that it had saved his life. As he sat there in the Jiffy Pump & Save Parking lot, the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared to the West.
And at that moment, Bobby Ray realized fate hadn’t cursed him after all. Fate’s kiss had saved his life.
I learned this particular lesson from my brother, who inadvertently became a philosopher at the sage age of six.
Our parents had taken us to an Easter egg hunt at the nearby Hills shopping center. He was placed in a corral in the corner of the parking lot with other kids his age. A few strands of straw had been thrown on the asphalt for appearances (certainly not safety, this being the early ’70s and all.) A starting whistle was blown and the children went into a piranha-like frenzy, snatching up plastic eggs from the ground. As my brother reached for an egg, a bigger kid pushed him in the head and knocked him to the ground. He sat there crying for the rest of egg hunt, his basket empty. Afterwards, my mother came into the corral to console him.
“My bottom hurts!” my brother wailed. My mother gently picked him up and found a broken plastic shell under his butt. And in it was the egg hunt’s Grand Prize, a $10 gift certificate to the Hills Department Store. (A fortune!, this being the early ’70s and all.)
My brother generously shared his winning with me, and the story has become a central tenant of my outlook on life: now, whenever I get knocked onto my ass, I try and remember to look around first before getting up, to see if I’ve won the grand prize.
To Marshall and also JP, all I can say is just…WOW!!!