My
mom is not a friend to the motor vehicle and she tried for years
to out duel our
various
modes of transportation in mortal combat. Given a year or
two she
would
invariably grind her mechanical nemesis into submission or send it
right home to
Jesus
and all the pretty angels. By this time in my life she had wrecked
into a tow truck
rolled
another truck and had blown engines and transmissions with reckless
abandon.
Fender
benders? Like most women indulge in chocolate. On this trip we had gone
south a few
hundred
miles to visit some of my dad's family and he had stayed home. On the
trip back we
were
all sleeping in the back and on the benches when arose such a clatter
that we all
awoke
to see why we were suddenly choking on noxious fumes. The reason was
because
the
engine had blown up as a result of driving up a very steep hill in
the red part of the
tach-o-meter
because we were in a hurry to get home before my mom succumbed to her
other
weakness, napping while driving. A classic rock and a hard place to choose your own poison situation. We all
scrambled out and
away from the smoking van in case it was going to exploded more. We were still in the time before cell
phone ubiquity and when
the smoke had quite literally cleared my mom started to try and flag someone down. We
were thirty miles from any town so even after she got a ride it was going to take hours to save us and she left
the other children in my
charge for all manner of roadside horrors to befall us. It was a new
moon and very dark and
lonely on the deserted road and my imagination started to run through
all of my ethical and
moral obligations in the event of a encounter with a drug crazed
serial killing Nazi psychopath. I determined that my personal obligation unfortunately included defending my siblings
even at the
cost of my own life. Diddly-darn-dangit. Therefore, I spent the balance of the
time regretting my fate and hoping no one, no evil-doer at least would stop and see that I was the only line of defense between them and rape and murder. . .or worse. Somehow, we didn't die that night on a dark stretch of I-15 by no fault of my
mother who took five hours
to organize a rescue. When the cavalry arrived my fear disappeared
and I felt grownup
and deputized into quasi adulthood. Maybe that is when I discovered
the terror of stewardship.
