by Kathy Brasby | Jun 3, 2013 | Family, Humor
I’m not a big fan of car commercials because I really don’t think the right car will give me peace, bring my family closer together, or define my sophistication index.
But I do like to tell car stories. Like this one.
We were filling our car at a little gas station in Omaha when we noticed a guy pushing his car up the driveway of the station. He was a skinny young guy but he handled his rig like he’d done this before.
He had a faded tank of a car that gulped gas and apparently had run dry somewhere nearby.
All the pumps were occupied so he guided his old vehicle to the curb and waited. Finally a spot cleared and he walked confidently to the front pumper, bent low, and heaved.
The car rolled like a lumbering ox to the open pump.
By this time, we were pretty sympathetic for this man who seemed to have had a touch of bad timing, running out of gas so close to the station. He settled his car by the pump like a mother tucking in her toddler and pulled out his wallet.
That pump allowed bills as well as credit card payments and so we watched as he tugged $5 out and slid it into the pump.
He pumped his gas – almost two gallons in those days – tightened the gas cap, and drove away. I knew then why he rolled his car with such confidence. He had done it before.
He reminded me of a guy we knew who wanted to borrow some money to buy gas.
Yeah, he’d gotten his paycheck but his pickup had two fuel tanks and the switch between the two tanks didn’t work. So he’d blown his week’s paycheck installing a new switch so that he had access to two fuel tanks rather than one.
Then he had no money for gas.
Could we help? We didn’t.
And then there was the gal who complained that she had to buy a radar detector. “And they’re expensive.”
“Why did you have to buy a radar detector?” I asked.
Her look made me wonder if I’d sprouted Martian antenna. “My tire has a slow leak.”
“Huh?”
“If I don’t speed, I can’t get home from WalMart before the tire goes flat. So I had to buy a radar detector.”
I checked to see if she had sprouted Martian antenna. I also wondered how a new tire compared to the cost of a radar detector.
For some people, their car defines their image. For others, their car just reveals it.
by Kathy Brasby | Apr 29, 2013 | Family, Stories
In my father’s last morning on this earth, I was privileged to sit alone with him for over an hour.
The night before, I realized that the family had come to tell Dad goodbye and assure him of their love. But Dad wasn’t able to speak at that point and I went to his bedside that last morning with one idea in mind: to speak what I thought he’d like to say to us.
I assured him that we knew he loved us. We knew he’d worked hard for us and that he had provided very well for our mother. I told him that we knew many practical things because of his teachings.
And then I launched into stories that I knew he’d remember.
“Remember our neighbors up north? Remember when they had a sick horse and called the vet but by the time he arrived, the horse had died. So the neighbor met the vet at the driveway. ‘The horse died. Do you want to see it?’ The vet shifted his pickup in reverse. ‘Naw, I’ve seen plenty of dead horses.'”
My dad loved a story and had told this one to the family many times.
I took his hand that morning and searched my memory for another story.
“Remember when you were tired of buying fly swatters for Mom? She was murder on those flies but the swatters splintered under her stern hand.” I swabbed some water in Dad’s mouth before going on. “You decided to cut a fly swatter from an inner tube and punched holes in it. That fly swatter could take on Flyzilla. The only problem was the black marks left on the walls when Mom went fly hunting.”
Once Dad would have snorted with laughter. Now he blinked and swished drops of water in his mouth.
“You’ll remember this one better than me,” I went on. “But I hear that when I was two, I could escape the fence around our yard and go exploring. When a guy doing groundwork with grader found me watching at the edge of his field, you decided to fortify that fence. I could shinny under the gate and I could climb up the wire fence. So you jammed railroad ties under the gate and put barbed wire at the top of the fence. It was that way until we moved. I was 13 by then, Dad!”
No chuckle. Once he would have leaned his head to the side and told me that he couldn’t be sure about me at 13, either. Not this time.
I gripped his hand like it might slip away at any moment. “You were always a little slow to talk about your World War II days, Dad. Being an orderly kept you away from the front lines. Maybe that was a failure to you but it was great to me because it meant you came home in one piece.”
No one drifted down the hallway past our room. Even the horse in the painting on the far wall seemed to hold its breath this morning.
“I remember the story you told about the young soldier who arrived in a body cast. The nurse insisted on pulling the bedsheets tight and clamped that young man’s feet flat to the bed. When he cried in pain, she called him a baby. But you came behind her and jerked the sheets off his feet. I still remember you bobbing your head as you said, ‘And he said “thank you” after I did that.'”
As Dad’s health had declined over the years, so had his ability to fix things. Whether inventing a better fly swatter or freeing a soldier’s painful feet, Dad responded to problems with a solution.
In his final years, Dad had not been able to solve what he had once easily fixed. He needed his children, whom he’d taught.
On that last morning, I wanted him to know that his gifts were remembered. And that his family, who had watched him for many years, could carry on what he had begun.
