This post is in honour of Kindness Week, which is just wrapping up here in Ottawa.
Rebecca over at A Little Bit of Momsense (one of my favourite local bloggers!) has been championing the cause of kindness for some time now as an official Kindness Week Blogger. She inspired me to dig up this old memory and post it here to share.
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I don’t know how old I was, but I was old enough to be scared.
I was just a kid, definitely under 10, and our car had just broken down on some remote stretch of highway.
There had been a smell, a smell of hot burning rubber that filled the car. There may have even been smoke, but I’m not sure if it was real or if that was a detail that added itself to this story later. But there was no mistaking that sharp smell. Something Was Wrong.
We pulled over to the side of the highway. My dad remembered that we’d passed a store, so he stuck out his thumb and hitched a ride back, leaving, of course, my mother and I waiting by the side of the road. We had no idea how long it would take him to get there and back.
It was hot, incredibly hot. Breathlessly hot. I thought I could hear sizzling. But maybe that was just the sound coming from the engine.
We had nothing, just ourselves and a broken down car. We were on the shoulder of a two-lane highway and there were ripples of heat coming off the concrete. I always loved those mirages – they looked like shiny puddles of water – and I often sought them out on long drives like this one.
There was no point sitting in the car. It was an oven in there. My Juicy Fruit had turned into a liquid that no amount of chewing could salvage.
There was a grassy field next to us and I wondered if it would be cooler there, but my mother wouldn’t let me explore. So we just sat there, waiting for our white knight to come to our rescue.
I couldn’t believe how many cars stopped to help us. So many people were willing to help. But my mother waved each one away, we’re ok, we’re ok, my husband vill be back!
I’m not sure how long we were there – baking in the heat – but at some point we saw a filthy old rust bucket of a van sloooooow down and pull over on the other side of the road. It came to a stop with a bump and a shudder.
Two men emerged, two large, enormously dirty men. Their clothes were dirty and stained with grease. One had a long scraggly beard – or was that another one of those things that my memory added later?
I was afraid. I could feel my mother tense up. I knew enough to know that this was not good.
They walked over to us, the heels of their boots scraping on the road with every step. The whole thing unfolded in slow motion.
They had a drawl, a strange way of speaking. They asked if there was a problem. In her broken English, my mother explained about the car. They popped the hood, took a look, and removed a blackened piece of something. They told us they’d be right back with a new thingamajig.
And as quickly as they had arrived, they were gone.
My dad arrived, having hitched a ride back on a stinking hot garbage truck. My mother explained about the two men. As it turns out, my dad had been worried about removing that same thingamajig. They had done the hard part, essentially making it easier for him to make a temporary fix that would take us to our destination.
He rigged something up as I knew he would – MacGyver style – using my mother’s pantyhose or something like that. And soon enough we were on our way, with me sprawled out on the back seat again, watching the telephone wires pass by my window in long graceful arcs. Only the odd bird interrupted that seemingly endless length of wire.
I also had an imaginary pet horse. He was white and had wings, but that’s another story altogether.
But I never forgot those two very dirty, very scary big men. I learned that it’s best not to make assumptions based on appearances, and that it’s not always the white knights who come to our rescue when we need them, but sometimes the dirty ones do too.
