Through the Eyes of a Delivery Goddess |
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This will be a long one, but will be a double whammie in the end, if you can stay with me... Most of you know that my first husband, David, and I have remained good friends. I stopped by his house one afternoon to pick up a few boxes of stuff he found and thought I'd like to have. He lives in a housing plan or development where the streets are a pretty black asphalt and the berms are neatly angled to prevent water erosion of the front yards. The house across the street sits about thirty feet back off of the road and has two brick pillars on either side of the driveway. At the time of this particular visit, my emergency brake cable was frozen, so I basically had no emergency or parking brake. I typically only drive manual transmissions, so I pulled up in front of the house, left the truck running in neutral and cut the front wheels away from the curb (berm) ... like I'd done many, many times before. Dave met me on the front porch and picked up a few things himself to help me carry the couple of boxes to my truck. We stood and talked for ... I suppose it was three, maybe four minutes? Perhaps if he reads this he can correct my memory. Suddenly, Dave, (who has always had reflexes faster than a hummingbird's wings), dropped the items in his hands and started to run toward the street. One of the loafers he was wearing flipped up into the air while he was running down the hilly front yard. As he stepped onto the asphalt road, somehow the other loafer got tangled under his feet and it too flipped into the air as he rolled one complete revolution onto his back, and back onto his feet, never missing a step. It all seemed like slow motion - my truck had jumped the angled curb, since the wheels were cut, the truck was free-rolling in a circle, aiming straight for the neighbor's driveway. Amazingly enough, the truck rolled backward directly between the brick pillars - BUT, the driver's door was open, so it hit against one of the pillars and swung around beating against the front fender, (inside-out of sorts). The truck continued it's circle up the small hill that led from the driveway up to the house and came to a brief stop parallel to the front of the house- might have been three or four feet between the truck and the house. About this time, David had made it to the driver's side of the truck, which was facing the neighbor's house - I saw his arms fly up into the air as he slipped on (I assume) the wet grass landing nearly under the truck. He sprang back up to his feet as if he'd landed on hot coals while simultaneously, the truck was starting to roll forward again, back down the little hill toward the driveway - wheels still cut sharply. He leaped into the open driver's door (remember, the door is now laying against the front fender, inside-out) and pulled.... TA-DAH ... the frozen emergency brake - leaped out with a HUGE smile on his face. The smile disappeared as more quickly than a blink when he realized the truck was still rolling. There was no way for him to know the cable was not working. The truck continued to roll back down into the driveway as - barefoot - he started to chase it again. Managed to LEAP into the door again - shoved it into gear and turned off the key. The look on his face as he got out THIS time was more like, "What the heck just happened???". He glanced up at me, glanced back at the truck - I hadn't even been able to move a muscle the entire time. The whole trauma probably took all of four or five seconds, not nearly enough time for me to react even one step. He walked back across the yard as if nothing had happened, picking up his shoes along the way. I was finally able to take a few steps toward the motionless truck across the street - neatly parked between the brick pillars ... well ... except for the inside-out door. We both looked at the door, David bent it back around, but of course, the door post was badly twisted and the door would not stay shut. I stayed inside while he found a piece of rope and tied it to the body of the truck cab to get me home. His elbows were scraped up - the big toe on one foot was all scraped up, but he never paid any attention to his brush burns in an effort to keep me from feeling badly, I think. Now, here comes the second whammie. I was not done delivering papers yet - I was living in the house that Bob and I live in now, but we were not married, and he was living in Sarver. I pulled into my back yard at home with my bandaged truck, and managed to place a call before he was completely out of the area after finishing his paper route. He came to my house, we loaded the rest of my North Hills News Record papers into his truck; he drove and we finished my route. It was the wierdest thing - more than half of the remaining papers had dog-dirt all over one corner of each paper. I tried to put them aside, but soon realized I was going to have to use some of them. Those dirty papers were delivered - folded inside a plastic bag which I tied shut - to folks who hadn't paid their bill in a few months. I have no idea how long each paper sat in the smoldering sun, or if anyone even realized they had a dog-dirty paper BECAUSE they owed me for more than one month's subscription, but it was amusement I needed in light of knowing I was going to have to spend a few thousand dollars to get the cab of my truck rebuilt. Bob and I laughed about it the whole way back to my house, and when I got into my truck again to look things over, I realized there was dog-dirt all over the key, the gearshift and the steering wheel. Remember when I said David had slipped in what I assumed was wet grass, nearly landing him under the rolling truck????? Later, we realized that it had been only seconds before my truck started to free-roll, that the neighbor had been parked in her driveway, between the pillars, and had gone to the Donut Shop, leaving the space between the pillars empty.!!! There are NO coincidences. The standing joke is now,.... "Pay your bill, or I'll put your paper at the bottom of the litter box for a few hours before I deliver it!!" See? Aren't you glad you stuck with this long story?? |