Monday, The Unabridged Original

I swear to you everything that I am about to type really honestly happened all in one day in the order it is printed. I was actually living it and I kept saying all day long, "I cannot believe this is all happening in one day." I would usually want to cry or have a mental breakdown for lesser things, but today, sheer determination ruled my mind. I was going to work and nothing was going to deter me. Now don't get me wrong, I do love my job, but no more than the average person. There was nothing great going on there, it was a Monday. There was no special reason to go other than it is my job and I go there.
A little background might be helpful. I am a cook at a community college in Nebraska. During the summer our twelve member team is pared down to a skeleton crew since there are few students to serve. We normally serve two-hundred a day during the school year and maybe twenty in the summer. I am one of the two who volunteered her summer away to work and bring home a steady paycheck since my budget really couldn't afford doing without income for three months.
Also, I am Mormon, but not extremely devout. I do say a quick prayer most mornings and in the evening, but not down on my knees as is proper. Prayers for me are usually the last thoughts before my mind is covered in the fog I call sleep and then again after the screaming of the alarm clock at five-thirty a.m., when I need an excuse to keep my eyes shut a tad longer. It would really be irreverent to pray with my eyes open.
I live an hour away from my job and lately my van has been doing things I would rather it not do. I have in the past few months developed the following prayer.
"Holy Father in Heaven. Thank you for another day. Thank you for my job and especially for my daughter. Please, please please let the van keep running. I can't afford to replace anything else for a few months. I would so very much appreciate it. Please help us all to go safely about our daily activities. In the name of thy Son, Jesus Christ Amen."
That's pretty much how it goes every morning and come to think of it every night. At night I throw in "Thank you for letting the van run all day and getting me to and from work."
When I arrive at work, I say "Thank you."
When I get in the van at work or in any parking lot I whisper, "Please, Heavenly Father let it start."
Yesterday was Monday. I said my prayer, got out of bed, showered and decided I should be to work thirty minutes early because I remembered a small group we needed to prepare for. That was probably my first mistake. Had I just thought what the heck and left at seven a.m., it probably would have been a normal non-eventful day. I went out to the van and was very grateful it started. Maybe I did forget to say thank you, now that I think about it. I backed out and drove one house length to the stop sign at the corner. My brakes seemed different somehow. I hoped it didn't mean anything. I drove a block to where highway fourteen leads me out of town to the south and turned right. I then went to the gas station just to wash the tree sap off the windshield. The glare of the sun illuminated every dot of it and made it impossible to see. Maybe I didn't appreciate the tree sap enough or maybe I didn't say thank you again when I got back in the van. I turned back onto the highway and all seemed fine. About two miles farther we have two truck stops across from each other.
"Who I want to know would build a truck stop right across the street from a truck stop?"
I don't know when I started to talk to myself out loud, but I question myself a lot. The one truck stop has been there since the beginning of time and the other less than a year. The new one has been a source of aggravation since day one. It stands at the bottom of an overpass leading out of town, and right next to an off-ramp leading into town. Trucks are required to stop at the scales. Every morning some truck driver is waiting at the bottom of the hill for the moment when it is too late for me to stop to pull out. Every evening some driver pulls out of the truck stop thinking he can make it to the overpass before I become part of the back of his trailer. I feel like a kamikaze pilot some days and others more like a target. The speed limit posted is sixty. I drive sixty. Every morning, just as I top the hill, whatever semi has been there patiently waiting for traffic a mile away decides he can make it through however many gears it is going to take him to pull a trailer onto the highway into the opposite lane before I get to the bottom of the hill maybe ten yards away. I used to lay on the horn and cuss. Now I stomp on the brake and hold hard on the steering-wheel. Come to think of it this could be the cause of the alignment problems and the reason I am a member of the tire of the month club.
So, it is Monday. I am early. I am on top of the overpass and the requisite truck is in position. I prayed. I never pray here, my whole day was off though. "Please don't pull out. Please, p..leeeezee don't pull out." Apparently, I should have prayed to someone other than the truck driver because he sucks at answering prayers. I stomped on my breaks. Remember that odd feeling? Well, this time there was no feeling. The pedal went clear to the floor and never came back up. The trailer was dead in front of me. I knew any vehicle in the other lane had to be stopping or hitting the cab from the other side. Now the older truck stop has it's driveway right where the nose of the truck was. Gas pumps are just inside the drive and a building ten yards from them. I turned my wheel left and rocketed around the nose of the truck. I can still see in vivid detail the horrified looks of the driver and also the lady pumping gas on the other side. I streaked past her safely on the opposite side of the pumps and into the area where the trucks park for the night. Veering around the building and back out the same entrance I entered, I was now turned around and heading home. The truck was still there. The overpass going up was helpful in slowing down, but the other side, going down, not so much. I just kind of coasted back into town, only using the gas pedal when I had to. I turned back into the driveway and went inside where my roommate was sitting at the computer. She and I are single parents who merged our families two years ago to help ends meet. We are not gay if that is what you are thinking. Just poor and lonely most of the time. We have one vehicle between us and now it didn't have brakes. She had used it the night before to drive thirty miles away to meet a guy. She was pretty surprised to see me walking in the door at seven a.m.
"Is there something you need to tell me about last night?"
She looked really shocked then said, "Um well we did have really great sex."
"EWWWWWWWWWW!"
That might explain the brakes if it happened in the van. I didn't choose to go there.
"I really wanted to know why you didn't tell me the brakes went out."
I was getting tired of her shocked looks so I recanted my tale of the last fifteen or so minutes. She put on her shoes and went out with the keys. By the time I got there she had the problem well in hand.
"We will have brakes in a few minutes. It helps if you put fluid in sometimes."
She is the mechanic that keeps all our junk running. She can fix anything. Duck tape and super glue are usually involved, so I had to admit I was a bit skeptical.
"Go across the street to the co-op and buy brake fluid."
I knew how to do this. When I was married I watched my husband do it. I had three choices, small, medium and large. It seemed to me to be a large problem so I paid seven dollars and got the large bottle. It also seemed to me that brake lines are kind of long and need lots of fluid to fill them up. I presented her the bottle.
"Damn!"
I am not sure what that meant, but later that morning she would be glad we had the industrial sized bottle. She filled up the little container and pumped the brakes a little. We heard a clicking sound. We both listened; certain it couldn't be good. We heard the sound change to a squeak and something possessed us to believe that meant the fluid was going where it needed. She drove around the block, came back and said, "you better call and tell them you won't be in today."
"You are so kidding! We can't loose a whole day's wages!"
I now look at everything in life according to how long I have to work to afford it and I knew we couldn't afford brakes and a day off on the same day.
"Well, don't drive faster than twenty-five and pray that nobody gets in front of you. Start stopping about fifty yards before you need to be stopped."
I called work and explained the situation, was assured they would cover my shift. We spent the next thirty minutes calling everybody we could think of that could help. Finally the best plan we could come up with was to drive to another town thirty miles away (we seem to live thirty miles from everything) and discuss the situation with another female friend who is just as poor and just as lonely, but is always there for us.
"Maybe Mork can fix it for us," my roommate said.
"Mark is fifteen!"
The son of this friend we were going to see, he does have a way of knowing how to fix almost anything. The fact that they call him 'Mork' disturbs me because I keep thinking about that guy from Ork and I didn't really want either of them working on my brakes. Thankfully, Mark has more sense than we do and suggested some places we could ask around for help in the town. Every place we tried was closed. Maybe Monday is a holiday I don't know about. I could have eliminated all these problems had I only known.
"Maybe everybody but us has the sense to stay in bed on Monday."
She was making sense, but I was not amused.
"Apparently."
We eventually ended up at Squawkbox's house. Now I am told that Squawkbox was once quite a catch. Now he is annoying and has a speaking device surgically implanted in his throat and needs a microphone held up to it to speak. He sounds like a robot and when he smokes, the smoke comes out the speaking device in his throat. This man is after any woman that will have him and he knows she is out there somewhere. My roommate tells me he has three wives and every intention of making it five before he dies.
"Isn't that illegal?"
"He doesn't care."
This is the only man we could find competent enough in two towns to bleed our brakes.
He is the jolliest man and will help anybody do anything without any expectations whatsoever. We just had to put up with being hit on. He kept reminding us that he hadn't had a woman in five years, but he was still looking. I was really hoping he didn't want this to be payment. He would be quite a catch, he just had surgery he said so his bladder works fine now, but he has to use "this God-damned cane cause I'm not worth a damn since that day." I don't know what day. The day of the surgery? I was afraid to ask so I just nodded. It was scaring me enough to actually understand what he was saying.
He had us on the road in no time. I got home and called work. I could be there by two-thirty p.m. which was good, because nobody could work the night part of my shift.
I got dressed. I must have forgotten to pray and say "thank you." Usually it doesn't take so much prayer; once in the morning and I am good to go. I went out to the driveway and now the tire was flat. These are new tires that were just replaced two weeks ago when I thought my rear axle was broken. God loved me that week when all he made me pay was eighty-dollars for a set of tires. I felt blessed. There really is a loving Father in Heaven watching over us. I walked across the street where we bought the tires, explained and of course he had three vehicles in the bays and two waiting, but he could get to me inside of an hour. O.k. I went home and started dialing. It takes an hour to get to work, and I should have left thirty minutes ago to be there in time to prepare dinner. None of my co-workers would answer the phone and my boss was on vacation. I could see the tire shop from the front door, and like an excited puppy, I kept bounding up to it to check the progress. It would have helped if I had left them the key, I found out later; but then I couldn't have watched them work on it from the porch. The exact instant I saw the tire come back out of the shop, I was out the door and walking down the street.
Finally I was off. It was the hottest day of the summer so far, my white work shirt was already drenched with sweat and the air coming through the windows is like a blast furnace on the equator. I was happy. I was thinking how fortunate I was to have a roommate who knew people who would work on cars for free and how God loved me so much all I had to purchase was a tire repair for thirteen dollars.
Remember the overpass from this morning? Well, right at the precise place I had to slam on my brakes eight hours earlier, a tractor trailer sat jack-knifed. He was taking up both lanes and the only way around him was in the ditch. By this point I was starting to think God really didn't want me to go to work.
"Is there some reason I am not supposed to be either on the road or at work?" I shrieked as I pounded on the steering wheel. I had to remain focused. There would be people at the cafeteria in exactly one hour and I would be there feeding them something. I was determined. I sat there patiently trying to change the night's menu in my head to something fast that didn't require more than fifteen minutes work. The four cars in front of me in turn turned around and went back the way they came.
"OH! NO! That's not happening! I am going to work!"
Officer friendly walked up to my window, "where are you headed today ma'm?"
"Hastings, hopefully."
"If you don't mind the interstate, I can have you on your way as soon as this line of cars going around the truck gets back on this side of the road."
If I am shopping downtown, the interstate is perfect. Otherwise, It is a full twenty minutes out of my way.
"O.k. that would be great!"
Pedal to the metal and I was focused. I could do this. I had no earthly idea how, but I was going to work. Half of me prayed somebody had got my messages and showed up, and part of me was going to be really pissed if I got there after all this trouble and somebody was there doing my job. I had never seen so many people on the interstate. Campers, trucks, if anyone would have heard my road rage, I would have been locked up for terroristic threats in the first three miles. Somehow, I managed to get to work at the very last minute I possibly could and still be able to pull anything off. Nobody was at the cafeteria. I ran to the freezer for the manicotti. There was none. I decided to make Fettuccine Alfredo so I got water boiling. Chicken hot wings were fast so I turned on the fryer and decided burgers could be made on the grill to order. While water was boiling, burgers frying and fryer heating I set up the salad bar, condiment bar and put out desserts. Finally, I opened the doors and everyone flowed inside, never suspecting what it took for me to get to work. Oh, but the fun was yet to begin. Before the shift was over, I would dump out a whole canister of tea on the serving area floor, drop a pop nozzle on the floor and step on it while looking for it, crushing it to smithereens. I dropped a ceramic crock of ketchup onto a kitchen floor mat that has hundreds of small holes in it especially for foods to go through and melted a plastic bread bag to the front of the oven. I would not be deterred now. I had got to work, now I would get home.
I arrived home without incident an hour later and thanked Heavenly Father for getting me there safely, took a shower and went up to bed.
Tonight is Tuesday. As I write this, my roommate has taken our six children to the lake, because it is ungodly hot in the house. I am sitting here writing this and the phone is ringing.
"Hello?"
"Hey it's us."
"O.K."
"Guess what?"
"What?"
"I pulled out of the state recreation area onto the main road, and I have no brakes."
"Hey," I yell to the dog in the other room "has anybody seen the calendar?"