Incident in Texas

(Originally written November 6, 1999. I'm not sure of the reason for this except that at that time I may have been bringing this to mind as being significant for me.)

One of the results of not living a very stable life is that I have lived all over the place. One year I lived in Texas. (Saying "Texas" doesn’t mean much to a person who has been there. Texas is unbelievably large.)

As luck would have it, I also ran out of money, to the point that even finding food to eat was difficult. (That is, at one point I cut an apple into four pieces, figuring that one piece per day was better than a whole apple today, and three days with nothing.)

There were also some problems in the church, the exact nature of which I don’t think needs to be discussed here.

Yet, one day I happened to be particularly down, and I came across a young lady who had had a flat tire on her car. I offered to help as I do know how to change a tire. She was upset, as some women will be, because she figured that I was implying that she couldn’t change the tire, and, to be blunt, invited me to get lost.

I decide, instead, to stay and watch, and lucky for her I did. First, the car was old, which meant that it had one of the old bumper jacks rather than the modern jacks. As anyone who is older than I (and some people younger) know bumper jacks have a tendency to slip which has to be taken into account. As you can imagine, it slipped. Rather than put pulling the tire off from the bottom I would have done (so that my hands would never be under the car), she tried to pull the tire off from the top. Just then the jack slipped, pinning her under the car.

At that point she became less hesitant about accepting my help. Fortunately, she had another jack in the trunk, and in a very short time I was able to get the car off with only minor damage.