I was driving out to my daughter’s volleyball match in five o’clock traffic in searing hot late-August weather when my cell phone rang. Having retired from actively practicing law a couple of years ago to shepherd my son through his second round of leukemia and another bone marrow transplant, I don’t get many calls that aren’t one or the other of my kids or wife. So it was, when I was finally able to retrieve the ringing apparatus from my sweaty shorts pocket, my son’s name came up on the ID. I answered in my usual manner, instead of saying hello, just stating my name.
He sounded forlorn, “Hey Dad, the truck won’t crank.”
Hmm. I had been letting him drive the pickup truck that I ordinarily drove because the a/c in the old beat-up Suburban was broken and I wasn’t inclined to put any money in that heaping hunk of junk. The plan was for him to drive the Suburban ‘til it wouldn’t drive anymore, and then junk it. We’d bought it shortly after the birth of the seventeen year-old that had just informed me that my truck had some sort of problem. It was his to drive when he’d first gotten his license a little over a year ago—the perfect first car for a teenager, it seemed to me. If he wrapped its 6,500 pounds around a tree, too bad for the tree, but he’d probably be safe, and we’d not lose much in the transaction. But since I wasn’t commuting anywhere anymore, and he was now responsible for driving himself and his sister to and from school, I figured it was only fair that he drive my much newer and much nicer Toyota Tundra, especially while the near-100 degree temps persisted. The a/c in the Tundra worked fine, and it took a lot less time to cool its much smaller cab. But now, apparently, it was broken.
This would mark the second time in as many years that the Tundra had left someone stranded, and it only had about 70,000 miles on it. The 1987 Toyota SR5 four-wheel- drive pickup (the forerunner to today’s Tacoma) that it replaced, had never left me stranded over some 214,000 miles of service. If some drunk debutante hadn’t crashed into it in the wee hours of a cold January morning, destroying it more or less completely while it sat innocently parked alongside the street in its usual space next to my house, I’d still be driving it. That was a good truck, built when Toyota was still concerned with burnishing its reputation for good, but inexpensive, quality vehicles. The Tundra traded on Toyota’s reputation built with vehicles like the SR5, similar to the way the greenback in the early part of the previous decade traded on America’s hegemony in the nineties. By the end of the last decade, Toyota’s reputation for quality, and America’s military and economic prowess were hollow shells of their former selves.
As I was already several miles out of town, almost to the outskirts of the Birmingham metro area, while he was at school, which was close to the city center, there was no way I could do much of anything for him. I just told him to call his mother and have her pick him up on her way home. I could detect a bit of frustration and despair when I told him I couldn’t help him. In truth, the high school was within walking distance of our house. It was a long walk, about a mile and a half, but still. It’s a measure of the difference in our temperaments and raising that I would have probably just struck out on foot had the same thing happened to me when I was his age. Of course, two bouts of leukemia with two bone marrow transplants probably contributed to his apparent failure to consider employing a somewhat physically-demanding solution to his problem. Besides, it was about a hundred degrees. Alabama is a god-awful place in July and August. The only place in the lower 48 I’d rather not be than Alabama in July and August is Texas in July and August, or any other time of the year. I never understood that Crawford, Texas ranch vacation W always took in the blazing August heat. But then I’ve never understood anything about why Texans seem so fanatically devoted to Texas. It seems to me that perhaps they protest too much.
After I settled in at my daughter’s volleyball match, I called my son back to make sure he’d made it home okay, and to find out a bit more about what the truck was doing. He explained that when he turned the key in the ignition, the lights dimmed and there was only a “beep, beep” sound. I asked him whether the motor turned over. He asked me what I meant by the motor turning over. I said the internal parts of the motor are turning when the engine is running. To get the motor cranked, they have to be “turned over” a few times by the battery until the spark plugs and fuel take over to keep things running.
He replied, “Oh, okay, then no, it didn’t turn over when I turned the key.”
I thought to myself that I really should have spent more time teaching him the fundamentals of vehicular maintenance and operation. But I rationalized my failure away; explaining to myself that maybe if he’d not been recovering from his second bone marrow transplant during that critical fifteen/sixteen age, I would have done a better job of teaching him. But even as I rationalized it, I knew I was kidding myself. He could not have cared less about vehicular maintenance and operation, and of all the things I loathe in life, teaching surly, reticent, uninterested teenagers anything they’d rather not know ranked very high. He didn’t care how the vehicle worked, he just cared that it did, and I didn’t care to beat through his thick skull what a precarious foundation for living it is to depend on the kindness of strangers for meeting every last need. Like teenagers in all times and all places, he’d rather learn from his own experience than from the experiences of his elders, particularly the portion of which were also his caretakers. Perhaps if he’d been required to take a class in the basics of how a vehicle operates, he might have been interested in learning, at least enough to get a decent grade. With no grades on the line, and fully aware that I had his back, that he expected me to always and forever have his back, there was no reason to bother. If the goal of parenting is to raise a child such that he can survive on his own, I had so far miserably failed with this kid. If he was so fortunate as to survive another year, he’d probably be more or less on his own at college, with, of course, no responsibility to secure the resources necessary for survival, but still, but without me and his mom only a few miles or minutes away.
Contrary to my ruminations on the quality of latter-day versus earlier Toyota’s, the only thing wrong with the Tundra was the battery. The battery was about four years old, and four years is about what you get from a six-year battery these days. I took the wife, instead of the kid, with me to jump-start the vehicle so I could get it home and put a new battery in it the next day. The kid had invited several friends over to study for their math test, so he couldn’t come and learn how to jump-start a vehicle. It occurred to me that knowing how to jump-start a vehicle might be a more valuable bit of knowledge than knowing how to calculate derivatives, but perished the thought lest I be branded an educational heretic.
When I got the truck home, and his friends had departed, my son came downstairs and asked what had been wrong with it. I explained that the battery was dead, and that we had jump-started it, but that it might not hold a charge. I gave him the option of driving it to school the next morning if it held a charge that evening, otherwise, I would go and buy a new battery for it.
That’s when he announced he wanted to, “Ensure this sort of thing never happened again”.
I had to laugh. Of all the people in this world, how could he have surmised that he or I or anyone was so powerful and knowledgeable that no battery would ever again fail and leave him stranded? Did he not pay any attention to the ramifications of his two bouts with leukemia? I remembered years earlier sitting in my Sunday school class the weekend after the 9/11 attacks, listening to my classmates—all similarly-situated adults with children—complaining at how things seemed to have spiraled out of control. At the time, the kid that had just told me he wanted to ensure this would never happen again was seven years old and was battling a post-transplant infection that would ultimately have him knocking on heaven’s door. I had chuckled to myself in Sunday School that day, incredulous that anyone ever thought they had control over the events of their lives, but there it was. Indulging the fear of losing control that justified the ridiculous response to 9/11 pushed us to the brink of self-destruction, when the proper response would have been to slap these idiots upside the head and explain that any control they ever felt they had was just an illusion of their own devise. Nothing, not battery failings, not deadly diseases, not terrorist bombings; no risk can be controlled to the point of extinguishment without destroying the very things one is afraid of losing.
On the advice of several parents at the volleyball match, and my step father-in-law who was also in attendance, I took the truck the next day to Autozone to get a new battery. I had always before used Walmart, but that meant having two vehicles available, and carting an old battery in for turn-in, and picking and installing the new one on your own. Autozone installs them in the parking lot for you when you buy them, picking for you the one most appropriate for the vehicle in which it will be installed. More than once, I had purchased a battery from Walmart with the wrong terminals, or with the terminals in the wrong places, or that didn’t fit the compartment in which it was intended to go.
The local AutoZone is ideally situated at the convergence of three different human populations in the area. It is accessible from the west and north by the inner-city black community. In the east, was a thriving community of mostly Hispanic immigrants. To the south, lay my leafy exurban community of metro-sexual men that couldn’t tell a crescent wrench from a crescent roll, with their hip wives pushing their 2.1 kids in two thousand dollar strollers down the middle of the street on their way to the Urban Cookhouse to eat organically-grown vegetables raised by farmers whose names were plastered on the chalkboard menu. To be sure, I rarely encountered any of my neighbors on my occasional trips to the Autozone. But the place was always buzzing with activity. The AutoZone parking lot was like a huge open-air garage on a Saturday afternoon, with people buying parts and carrying them outside to install them.
The friendly black employee of AutoZone that sold me the battery (an eight year battery, which means I’ll probably get five out of it) was, like so many black men I meet, an everyday philosopher. He explained that his view of working was to just get to work and put the most into it he could, and let the Good Lord handle the rest—that in the premises, you pretty much decided for yourself how happy you would be. I couldn’t have agreed more.
I had noticed there were several signs around the parking lot prohibiting vehicular maintenance, which seemed new. I mentioned that I’d never noticed them before, and he said they had to put them up in case someone injured themselves while working on the cars. I asked whether they were ever enforced, and he said, “No, not really”, and smiled. He motioned to a lady sitting in her car in front of the store, explaining that she had just bought some brakes and was waiting for Julio to install them. She was white and not so hip, so maybe came from my little exurb, or maybe not. Julio, he explained, was just a fella that hung around the ‘Zone, working on cars for people as they required. Julio would send people to the ‘zone for their parts, and the ‘Zone would tell people that Julio could help with installation if need be. It was a symbiotic relationship. My new friend allowed that he wasn’t much of a mechanic—like me, just the basics—but that Julio had a knack, like all good mechanics, for knowing just how things went together to make them function properly. About the time we had gotten the battery installed (I helped a little while we talked—one of the terminals on the old battery had corroded and had to help prying it free), the lady needing new brakes had pulled around to the side of the store, and Julio was jacking up the front end to get at the disc pads. I stuffed a fin in my new friend’s pocket for a tip, and thought to myself, that the stuff going on in this little AutoZone parking lot is the same sort of stuff that made America great—regular people interacting on a personal level to secure the necessaries of life. Maybe there’s hope for America yet, but not unless she abandons the ridiculous idea that anyone can “ensure this sort of thing never happens again”, whether we’re talking car batteries, brake shoes or terrorist bombings.