I Should Buy A Lottery Ticket

In the last 24 hours, the car I was driving was hit by another car, the damage done by said car was fixable at a price I could afford, and then I won at Springo.

And it was a great weekend.

The car? Yeah, I was driving from Mary’s to T’s Friday night when my ’96 Honda Accord was struck - glanced, really - in the right front by a ’93 Cadillac DeVille. Judging from the look of that vehicle, post accident, I would say that the reason its right front tire had permanently left its axle was through embarrassment.

What a rust bucket that Cadillac was. If I were that tire, I would’ve ceded from that car, too.

The only real damage to my car, that is, the only damage that had to be fixed by reason of law – as opposed to the kind of damage that’s more in the oh-wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-fix-this category – was the turn signal, tucked down in the bumper, and the headlight, which were smashed and now litter Dowling Avenue.

The best part of the accident – which, as a quick aside, is like starting a sentence with “you know, the best part of having diarrhea…” – is that it occurred two blocks off the freeway. That is, what could've been a perfectly horrible situation three minutes earlier was instead an expense and adrenalin blast I could've done without.

Mary’s Jon had it fixed by late afternoon Saturday whilst Mary and I ran to the junkyard and then garage-saled ourselves into affordable sweaters, a pair of incredible boots (they’ll fit me when you’re done with them, Mary!) and a teeny-tiny Santa Claus candle for a dime…

When’s the last time you went to a junkyard, by the way? Was it worked by three Mexicans and a gray tomcat? North Imports was a muddy treasure’s island of oily and character-laden car parts sorted and piled on scaffolding to the top of an incredibly chilly pole barn.

Mary and I had stared upward into the shelving. All those bumpers, lock assemblies, transmissions. She had laughed. “Maybe staring up at 60-some years of old car parts with our mouths open isn’t such a good idea, huh?”

When you’re right, you’re right!

And after that? Once you’ve cheated death and the auto part industry, what’s a gal to do? I’ll tell you what she does: She gives Willie a call on her way home and drags him up to the Spring for beer and wings; and when the opportunity to play the Spring’s version of Bingo comes around, she knows she’s going to win, and she hopes it’s a free drink.

Yessiree, I did win the second of the two games I played, but they must’ve given away all the free drinks. The prize? A “The Office” gift pack: two ink pens and a Dunder Miflin While You Were Out notepad.

That's right. Today? Right now? I’m the luckiest person I know.