Why it Happens Like That

Life is a slapstick comedy. And when it’s me on the stage, I always seem to be the slappee, not the slapper.

I have had an excitingly terrible week. On Tuesday my car broke down. It had been showing a check-engine light on the dash off and on for over a week. Probably caused by a construction pothole that I hit really hard in mid-August. It was running okay until last weekend when it started coughing and kicking and letting me know in no uncertain terms that it might be dying. We chugged into the Five-Star-Ford service center where it may have breathed its last. The service supervisor told me that they are booked solid until October, so it will be sitting in their overflow lot until then.

But while my wife is still in the Philippines attending her sister’s wedding celebration, we still had her car to use, right? But then we found out that our number two son, who bought that car from my wife, is finishing his Air-Force MOS training and will need that car in Florida to do his first assignment. So, we go from a two-car family to a no-car family by Thursday. Then on Friday, that car also breaks down. I call Triple-A for a tow truck, but they send a battery specialist instead. (Well, I did tell the computer voice that my car wouldn’t start before I talked to a real person, so, my fault.)

But when the battery specialist arrived, he talked me into letting him check the battery. Sure enough, the battery was among the evil dead. And he had a battery with him to give us for free as AAA members. Aha! We temporarily have a car again.

And it was a good thing we had a car on Saturday. My daughter woke up with so much pain in the kidney area of her back that we had to go to Primacare to see a weekend doctor. But she has brand new health insurance. And Primacare couldn’t take that. So, they sent us to the Baylor Hospital Emergency Room. We were headed to a very expensive place with possibly no insurance coverage.

Well, we lucked out again. The hospital did, apparently, take her insurance. They did bloodwork and an MRI to determine it was a urinary tract infection easily treated with generic antibiotics, and no kidney stones showed up on the MRI. So, now, on Sunday night, she is comfortably recuperating in her own bed.

And I will have to solve the car problem by buying myself a new car, something I can actually afford to do since I paid off my bankruptcy debts last year.

But the question remains, why does this ping-pong game of endless crisis management always seem to happen to me?

First of all, the older I get, and the more my arthritis and my diabetes slow me down and make me clumsy, the more I find Physics, and Gravity, in particular, are now my enemies. I have to walk with a cane everywhere to prevent falling down. And, of course, I fall down anyway. I run into things when I try to move around them. Acceleration, impacts, collisions, and other actions that Physics applies to my locomotive powers erratically are a constant source of ill luck, worry, and pain.

If Statistics evens things out like the Statistics professors say it should, I have enough good luck coming to me to win the lottery three times and then live to a hundred and ten years of age to balance the scales of good and bad luck.