I Love Old Trucks

When I write on a piece of paper, usually deep inside a fat spiral bound notebook, the pen and my brain work together; they take over and the part of me responsible for ordinary thoughts sits back to observe. I rarely know what's going to come from the exercise, which most of the time is the point, and when I get to the end of the paragraph or the page I've usually worked something out. The something is almost always inconsequential, trivial, and useless. But that doesn't matter, because the point isn't to produce the profound but to clear my brain so there's room for day-to-day thoughts and decisions to move around without obstacles. But I'm not able to write like that at a keyboard. I need a topic, and sometimes before I start I even try to figure out the point, which makes for the worst writing ever because when I know the beginning and the end the stuff in the middle comes out as trite and sophomoric. (I might be thinking too much of myself--I might only be capable of trite and sophomoric and the stuff that I don't like is even dreckier than I think.)

-------------------------------------------------------

For the past few weeks the weather here has been stupid cold, but the temperature is rising, and today it's a balmy zero degrees. I think tomorrow it's supposed to get up to 10. Last night I headed out to Target and after about a mile got a flat, and was forced to change it on the side of the highway, in the dark, at -10 degrees. I didn't have my cell phone but I'm not sure who I would have called. A call for help would have been a call asking someone to do something that I can do for myself--and I'd like to think that I'm not that woman. Since the age of sixteen when I got my first flat tire I've been a big fan of the manual because it never steers me wrong, and last night with it as my guide I had the spare off the back, the lug-nuts loosened, and the jack under the car when I took a break to warm up inside. To pass the time I read the manual out loud.  There was a tap on my window. I looked up. A man was standing next to the car and his closeness startled me. He wanted to help. He was driving an old pick-up and was young, without hat or gloves, and was wearing an embroidered Budweiser jacket--similar to a high school letter jacket it had leather sleeves, a wool body, and snaps up the front. It didn't look warm. He removed the tire while I jacked up the car. It doesn't sound like much, but we were both in jeans kneeling in a foot of snow and he was using metal tools with bare hands. It was an act of kindness and I was glad for his company.