How fortunate

I have found a new mantra.  It came to me on a Saturday morning when after going to the Farmers’ Market, loading up the car with goodies, my husband heard a noise while we were backing up the car.  Dutifully, I got out and started to look around the car but I could not see anything that we might be backing over.  So happily we went on our way to our house, five minutes away to drop off some of the produce, plums, yellow and white kernel corn, little orange cherry tomatoes, green beans, dark purple grapes and melons.  When we got home, I prepared a box of the vegetables and fruits for my husband’s mom and we were off again without a worry.

Once at her house another five minutes away, we unloaded the vegetables and fruits, loaded ourselves into our white Toyota and headed away from her house to go grocery shopping which is our weekly routine on Saturday.  Not today. Just a block away, there was a thumping, a bumping and we stopped the car to see that we had a right front tire flatted by a large silver screw.

We called the repair shop and decided that my husband would put what he calls the donut tire on and that I would walk his ninety-two year old mother back to her house.  After I walked back to the car, I watched my husband changed the tire, using my body and hat to try and keep the sun off of him while he worked. After a bit of thinking, we decided that we would go grocery shopping after church on Sunday as the prospect of getting the tire repaired might take some time. I told my husband how fortunate we were that we were so close to his mother’s house and how fortunate for us that it was not raining and how fortunate we were not driving on Highway 101 with all of the summer traffic. 

We limped down the hill when there was more bumping and my sweet husband explained that he didn’t think that he had tightened the lug nuts on the wheel for the final time after he had taken the car off of the jack to lower the wheel back on the road.  He checked and sure enough, the lug nuts holding the tire were easing themselves off.  Once again, I thought how fortunate we were that we had not driven further and lost the nuts, the tire and ruined the new front brakes on the car.

My husband limped the Toyota on the back roads to our local tire shop after dropping me at home on the way and after waiting a couple hours, they told him that the tire could not be repaired and replaced it with a brand-new tire free of charge.  When he returned home and told me, once again we thought how fortunate that the flat tire was one of the older tires and not of the brand-new tires that he had put on the car two weeks earlier.

How fortunate, just two words but what a wonderful way to whisk your thinking quickly, painlessly into a moment of thoughtfulness, a spot of unexpected tranquility, a held breath of satisfaction.  How often, something unexpected happens to us without warning, a broken heel on a pair of favorite black shoes, a jar that cannot be opened so you have to change what you are planning for dinner, a favorite blouse that you cannot lay your hands on while getting ready for work so you reach for something else.  These are small things, the circumstances of my broken tooth over a month ago for me was a big, big thing but how fortunate that it broke off and fell into the sink while I was home, brushing and flossing in the comfort of my home.  How fortunate that my dentist was able to cemented back in on a Saturday.

After having experienced oral surgery this week, I can say once again how fortunate I am to have a doctor and his staff so well trained to take care of me, how fortunate that I was so well-drugged that I don’t remember a bit of the long drive home. As I sit here, typing waiting for myself to heal, I think again how fortunate I am in so many ways.  How fortunate, just two words but they might be just the ones you need today.