It was 1986. It was a good year. Life was college, and college was life. Some time that year, college life seemed to become a bit too heavy to handle. Classes were hard, my body was tired, and homesickness began to settle in for the first time in a couple of years. It seemed as if Spring Break could not arrive quickly enough. I had endured the flu in the midst of a snowstorm and a torrent of exams just a few days earlier, and it felt like so much more.

As I drove the final leg of a four hundred mile journey home for the break, my trusty 73 Chevy developed a growing and increasingly troublesome vibration in the front end. Then, it happened. It seemed as if the entire front of the car exploded. Upon exiting the vehicle, I found out it threw a tread from the left front tire, denting both my fender and my spirit. And, to add insult to injury, the multi-piece product of American engineering intended to jack the car up did not have all the working pieces in place. I was stranded, indeed.

After briefly considering hitchhiking the final 60 miles home in that era before cell phones, I begrudgingly decided to drive on the flat tire rim until I found a country home surrounded by a fenced yard full of pit bulls and a house full of an even scarier man. But, he let me use his phone (a land line) to call my dad. Continue reading It was indeed →