Northbound

You won’t have heard of Dr. W.V. Myres. He was a scholar on ancient Greek and Hebrew, and the Bible, and psychology, and wrote a thin little book some fifty years ago about Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount as a psychological text. He was my grandfather, but this isn’t about him. It’s about something he said — that you can never tell the difference between a blessing and a curse in the midst of it.

I’m tooling down Highway 29, going to work one bright sunny summer morning, when the “check engine” light comes on in my old Ford. “Curses,” says I. I took the car in for a diagnostic check that evening, and there was an ominous vacuum leak in the engine. So, Saturday, I got up early and took the car into the local service center.

The vacuum leak was easily fixed — a vacuum hose had come loose from the throttle, and they didn’t even charge me to fix it. But I said, well, as long as I’m here, you could maybe look at the suspension. I knew there needed to be a little work done on it, and had budgeted for it, and now was as good a time as any. So they fixed the suspension, no problem. The brakes were the problem, though. The rotors were about worn out. So they replaced those, and the brake pads, all for a significant portion of next week’s paycheck.

So I got the work done. It needed to be done, and I could pay for it easily enough, but the timing was dictated by the damned check engine light. If it hadn’t come on when it did, I would have gotten the work done next week (when I could have written a check for it instead of putting it on an already-overburdened credit card).

Driving home tonight. It was late. The Phillies had beaten the Rangers at Citizens Bank Park; we’d gone to the game down in Philly. I was driving home in my Ford; my fiancee was following me in her Honda. We were going 60 on Highway 202. Suddenly, a deer popped in front of me out of nowhere. I slammed on my newly-fixed brakes. I wasn’t going to be able to stop in time. I tried to steer out of the way of the deer, skidding into the right lane. The deer, startled, took off and started running towards me. I was standing on the brakes. Thwock. I saw the deer in my headlights, spinning away into nothingness.

I pulled over on the side of the road. My fiancee pulled over in front of me; she’d seen what had happened in time and was able to stop — a moment’s inattention on either of our parts and we would have collided. She checked out my car and couldn’t find any damage, except a crack in the right headlight and a tuft of deer fur. Apparently both the deer and I had survived the collision with minor damage.

What would have happened if I hadn’t got my brakes checked? I don’t know. All I know is that you can’t tell the difference between a blessing and a curse in the midst of it.