From the “No Horse Pucky” Archives

Fortune for the day – “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”- Albert Einstein

The time has come for another “No Horse Pucky” story. I haven’t recounted one of these types of stories, on the blog, in a long, long time. This story is from long ago. I wasn’t even married when it happened. I was engaged to be married, though.

It all happened in an ugly, green minivan. That particular minivan ruined minivans for me, for the rest of my life, despite a minivan’s convenient nature, which would have come in quite in handy, for a mother of a large brood like mine. You see, I was 23 years old and the ugly minivan, was an all expense paid company car. I had inherited the minivan from the previous textbook sales representative, a middle-aged family man, whose position I had taken over, after he left to go to a different company. I had sold my Barbie car (as my Dad liked to call it), a bright red, zippy Miata convertible, and I was now sporting around town in an unsightly, lumbering hunter green minivan. Blech!

Anyway, one evening on the commute home, being stuck at a long traffic light, I got distracted. I got distracted by my new, shiny, lovely engagement ring. I am, admittedly, a highly distractible driver. (My sister once said that I drive like it is an afterthought to everything else that I am doing.) I decided to take my engagement ring off, to admire it from all different angles, while waiting at the stoplight. While I was gazing adoringly at my new bauble, the light changed, and the rightfully irritated driver behind me, blew his horn loudly and long-ly. It startled me and I jumped, which made my engagement ring fall out of my hands, slide down the steering wheel column, down into a crack where the steering wheel connects into the dashboard.

At the next traffic light, I decided to use a pen to try to pry the crack open a little bit, so that I could slide my ring back up into my hands, to put it back onto its rightful finger. I pried the crack open so wide that the force of gravity swiftly swooped in, to teach me a lesson and the ring fell down into the crack, now disappearing from my sight. I started panicking, imagining that perhaps the ring had fallen out on to the road, as if the minivan was a bottomless car, the type driven by Fred Flintstone or Barney Rubble. (the van was pretty bad but not THAT bad) In my hysterical state, I cut off three lanes of traffic to take a sharp right turn into the nearest service station that happened to be right there, like a lighthouse, a great beacon of hope, in the desert of my despair.

“Help me! Help me, please. My engagement ring fell behind my steering column!” I shouted out to the man in the back corner of the garage. The man, covered in grease, eyed me up and down, suspiciously and motioned for me to pull the minivan into a stall of his garage. He dismissed my silly fears of the ring falling onto the highway and told me to go calm myself down, in his small, dumpy waiting room.

About a half hour later, the man sauntered into the waiting room, holding my engagement ring. He informed me that he had to remove the steering wheel, to retrieve my poor ring, which had been like a small, innocent, pretty animal, waiting patiently, yet desperately, at the bottom of a dark, smelly well.

“Ma’am”, he addressed me with a stern scowl on his grease-marked face. “Let this be a lesson to you. This is why we DON’T take these things off.”

No horse pucky.