- December 20, 2024
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The best part about getting your car stuck in mud is how it offers ample time to thoughtfully reflect on all of the other ways in which your life is in shambles.
The longer you’re stranded out there, your 14-year-old Civic seeming to sink deeper and deeper into the softball field parking lot, the longer your list of disappointments grows.
“First I run out of milk for my Frankenberry this morning, and now this?!” you mutter, attempting to defiantly kick pebbles but losing your left, kicking cleat in a dark patch of what you’re now is convinced isn’t mud but, rather, a scientifically modified shoe-/car-eating goo.
Just my luck.
They say that if you ever get caught in quicksand that you should never fight it. Instead, they say (“they” being my friend Moey, of course), you should be still, never panic, sit and wait for help that just might never come.
So that’s what I did, hunched over on my trunk, regarding the moon.
In these quiet times of introspection, as you wait for pickup truck-driving T-ball dads to finish watching their sons play so you can beg them for help then go home to shower off the shame of this night, it’s hard not to think about all the times you’ve swung and missed at these fields, all the games you lost, all the times they ran out of Butterfinger at Steak N Shake and you had to settle for a painfully second-rate M&M milkshake, instead.
Life has been so cruel.
But sometimes, there’s a beauty in that cruelty, too — like when a total stranger offers to help push your car without you even asking him, and you two get it free, just like that. And the whole thing’s over. And then you smile wide, say thank you, but you’re almost surprised by just how much you really mean it.
You won’t know why, but you’ll feel like riding home with the windows down after that, the music loud and your hand extended out toward space, your fingers mingling with the stars. And you’ll smirk while you’re driving, the night air cool through your hair. And you’ll think of just how tragically forgettable this moment is, and how many like it since you started making memories you must have already forgotten.
But you’ll keep driving, as if the highway were stable and forever and built just for you. As if this moment really mattered. As if the roadway were more than just mud reimagined.
BY MIKE CAVALIERE | ASSOCIATE EDITOR
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