My car and I have an interesting relationship.
In the eight months since I got my licence and my father gave me permanent ownership of his beloved car, we've had many highs, and a couple lows.
There were highs like barreling down the highway at 105 kilometres an hour, singing along to the radio, windows open, cows placidly mooing on either side. Highs like stealing my nephew and buckling him into his carseat and speeding through massive puddles this spring, just to make him laugh and shout, “Crazy driver!” Highs like freedom, and being able to go wherever I want.
There were lows. Winter was a long, cold low, as I learned to drive hunched over to see through the slowly defrosting window because the heat took a while to warm up, and for part of the winter, I was required to drive across Wainwright at 5:30 a.m., and I flatly refused to wake up half an hour early to let it run.
Then there was that climactic and awful moment when my car died on the side of the highway on the way to Wainwright, leaking power steering fluid and weakly coughing up smoke.
When I look back on my years with my first car, these are the moments that will run through my head like a movie montage, set to music at times inspirational, at other times, ominous and tragic.
This weekend, when I left my apartment on an innocent mission to get some groceries and discovered my tire had inexplicably gone flat overnight, was a low.
I never really thought about how tragically unprepared I was for this eventuality. I've got a book called something like “The Complete Guide To Surviving On Your Own” or something similar, and I'm pretty sure it had a chapter on changing a tire, probably between boiling eggs, and changing a light bulb. The theory was all there.
In practice, however, I failed.
I called my dad. I called my mom. I called my sister, four best friends scattered all over the country, and sent out a panicky text to just about everyone I knew. Then, at a loss, I took a sad picture of my tire with my phone and uploaded it to Facebook with the caption, “Please advise.”
That's when it started to rain on me.
The sky was blue, the clouds were fluffy and white, and at first, I thought it was a sprinkler. It wasn't. Somehow, the universe had conspired to flatten my tire and then rain. Just on me.
“How is this my life?” I mumbled.
On the upside, though, the tire hadn't gone flat on my drive home from Cold Lake at 1 a.m. the night before. I slumped in my driver seat, wondering about what I would have done if that had happened.
I was trying to decide between whether I would have just curled up and slept in my car, or tried to walk home, and whether or not I was more likely to be slaughtered by a passing motorist or the Fort Kent Wendigo, when my phone rang.
Then, while my inner feminist gently wept (on the inside, because the only thing more pathetic than slumping on the pavement beside a car with a flat tire is weeping while doing so), I sat there waiting for a boy to come and change my tire. (Thanks, Brandon).
My car and I have an interesting relationship – but after this, I don't think we'll be speaking for a while.
