Flat Tires

It's one of those evenings. I have exactly 15 minutes in which to drive to the soccer field, pick up son Zac from practice, drop him at home (where I’ve left a bowl of chili warming on the stove), and drive daughter Casey to school for a meeting to sign up for clarinet lessons. If the traffic lights are with us, I can make this a perfectly synchronized evening.

What I haven’t counted on is this: running over something hard (a bottle?) on the road that thunks the underside of the car in a sickening way. Five minutes later, the car tugs radically to the left. I pull off the road into the back entrance of WalMart and sure enough, the front left tire is flatter than Kansas.

Life, of course, is full of choices. Here’s one for me now: use the cell phone for its original purpose (road emergency) and wait a minimum of 30 minutes for the tow truck, or change the tire myself.

The choice is easy: Casey has gone deadly pale at the prospect of being late, or possibly missing, the first night of her musical future. Besides, I’ve changed tires before.

"Out of the car," I holler. "We’ve got work to do." The kids gather around the trunk, impressed by the secret compartment below the flap of carpet, which I whip unceremoniously to the ground. I loosen the little spare tire (it looks like a Red Flyer wagon wheel!), produce a lug wrench from a gray bag tucked in the wheel well, unbolt the jack, and pluck out the metal rod for cranking the jack. "Go, Mom!" Zac says. "We don’t need help. We’re independent!" He says the word independent with such pride and glee that I am fortified: I have made the right decision. The evening is taking on mythic proportions, soon to claim its place in family folklore, along with the night Mom killed a bat with a broom, and the night Mom pulled a bleeding woman from a car wreck.

Casey retreats behind a telephone pole. I assume she’s biting her tongue to keep from scolding me about the meeting, which now starts in five minutes. Later she tells me she was crying there, and I am stunned, once again, by the intensity of her emotions. For now though I am grateful for her silence and think she is simply keeping quiet so I can get the nasty tire-changing business done.

Zac squats beside me. "I think it goes the other way," he says, pointing to a groove in the jack. I flip the jack over. "Try standing on it," he says when he sees me straining to loosen the lug nut. I stand. We’re flying now. We’re in the Sims Pit Stop and every second counts. I crank the car up, wrestle the flat tire off and pop the new one in place. The kids haul the flat tire away and toss it in the trunk. We are all dirty now, and I’m sweating with the effort of trying to get the night back in sync.

Fifteen minutes later, Zac’s at home eating chili and Casey is signing up for band lessons. The meeting is dull and the room's outrageously hot. I think about the first time that I changed a tire. I might have been 11 or 12 years old, riding with my family on our way to a ski resort. My sisters accepted a ride to the ski lodge but I stayed with my father. Did my father chose this occasion to teach me how to be independent? Probably he just didn't want to get his hands cold, or else I pestered him to let me try changing the tire.

The next day, when I tell this story to my women acquaintances, they are unanimous in their response: I couldn’t have done that, they all say. I wouldn’t know where to begin, they all say. I think of the mechanic in the garage using a power tool and a hydraulic jack to replace my tire, not even breaking a sweat. I think of my son, how someday he will marry a woman who can change tires as quickly as she can change clothes, and my daughter who will glide from her clarinet to her lug wrench with casual grace. In an odd way I am grateful for that flat tire, grateful to the idiot who dropped a glass bottle on the road. Tires come and go. Family folklore is indestructible.