Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Our Bean, the Trooper...

“I WAS MADE FOR LOVING YOU BABY, YOU WERE MADE FOR LOVING ME.” My brain slowly comprehended that Doug’s ringtone was blaring from my purple berry as I drug myself into a conscious state.  Panic was the first emotion I felt. It was 10 after 11 that night and the man knows I am in bed by 9:00 p.m.  He wrecked. He must have crashed my precious Jelly Bean!!!!

“Hello?” I know I answered groggily and with a question. You know, like what the hell are you calling me for I have been sleeping long enough I was entering REM.

“Love, I need you to come get me. Something is wrong with the transmission on the bean.”

I muttered something incoherent but he hadn’t spoken the words “crash,” “wreck,” “bleeding” or “hospital” so I know my alertness immediately started to die. In fact, I was almost asleep when I hear his voice nearly shouting at me….

“Are you awake?! Are you going to remember to get up and come get me?”

Yeah, yeah of course I was. Right? Wrong. I totally went back to sleep. Who knows for how long…

When he called I told him the low fuel light had gone on in the truck on my way home so would I need to get gas and he told me yes. So not only did I have to drag myself out of bed but I also had to get totally dressed because I had to pump gas. I left my new glasses in Idaho last weekend so I was rocking glasses with a prescription 3 years old. This was not my idea of a good Tuesday night…er, Wednesday morning by this time.

So anyway, I get dressed, I go pump ten dollars’ worth of gas, I squint my way into 20/20 vision with the help of the old glasses and I drive across town to get Doug from work.  The whole way there all I could think was how on earth were we going to afford a new transmission, how did this happen, didn’t we just get a tune up and everything checked out, the bean is a trooper what are we going to do?!?!?!

So I get there and my husband is annoyed and tired and just wants to get home, but of course not without showing me that the gear shifter is just flopping around all Willy Nilly and not connecting to any of the gears. Great. Just. Freaking. Great.

My husband is a level headed man. He always has the attitude that life happens and we will just make it work. Do what’s right, pay your tithing, be a good person…it all will take care of itself.  So while I am fuming and telling him, “Whatever you do, don’t tell my mother because I don’t want to hear I told you so from her and she will say I told you so because she keeps saying the bean wasn’t meant for road trips” he was just quietly driving home with complete confidence this would all look better in the morning. So we prayed. And we slept.

And he was right.

This morning he woke up with the epiphany that sometimes on manual transmissions the gear shifter itself disconnects from the transmission and it is just a matter of reconnecting it with a bolt or something else manly and tool sounding. So he drops me off at work and drives to the bean and sure enough, he fixes it. In about two minutes.

Turns out, the bean was made with a bunch of plastic parts and the gear shifter just slipped out of one of them. He slipped it back in and PRESTO! The bean was revived.  This is great news. We can go to Rock Springs this weekend now and not spend our life savings.  We can go to the wedding in August we are set to attend. You see, no matter how poorly built the bean may be for road trips, she’s all we got and we’ve got to make do with her. She will live on!

All that to say, I didn’t need to stress eat that bowl of ice cream, the plate of nachos, OR get woken up in the dead of the night if he had only had that epiphany about 8 hours earlier….

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