Tuesday surprise

This is our Tuesday/Thursday schedule: we leave the house at ten to drive down to Utah Valley University which is a forty-five minute drive. We stop at the drive-thru at McDonald's and I order an egg McMuffin and Tom orders a sausage, egg , McMuffin and we both have a small orange juice. We eat it in the parking lot and then move onto I-15.

This morning, we did the same, only today as we were approaching Pleasant Grove a truck passed us loosening a steel grate in the highway, which popped up and hit the side of our car in the wheel, taking a chunk out of the tire rim and damaging the front suspension system.

I was driving and there was a second when I thought I wouldn't be able to straighten the car. It felt like a refrigerator had hit us. The car wobbled and made sickening grinding noises. I pulled off to the left into a construction zone.

Thank heaven the old people, who refuse to move on with the new technology, have a prepaid cellphone in their car. Tom called AAA. They called the highway patrol. About twenty minutes later, a very nice highway patrol man on a motorcycle pulled up and discussed the possible damage with Tom. He asked me for my license, which of course I didn't have with me. He said, "It doesn't matter."

Really? It doesn't matter? Give that highway patrol man a big wet kiss. I think I love him.

Two other people had hit that steel grate and it had been removed from the highway, he said. He said a highway patrol car was coming to park behind us to protect us from traffic.

Sure enough, a woman in a patrol car showed up. She stayed with us for another fifty minutes until the tow truck arrived to tow us back to Salt Lake.

We ate chocolate covered pomegranates and drank water.

The tow truck driver was this sturdy twenty-four year old kid as nice as any grand-child. He changed the tire. I got to sit in the back seat of this humongous truck. I said, "Gee, this is like riding in a fire engine."

It doesn't take much to make me happy.

He dropped us off at Mark Miller's Toyota on West Temple. Our car is thirteen years old and it's been awhile since I've been at Mark Miller's. The marble service center has a small restaurant. I sat in the "living room" with the 52 inch screen TV set on NBC, and a woman brought me free hot chocolate.

I know I'm sounding like the Little Match Girl, but I was awed by the affluence of the Toyota service center. People, the whole world must be buying Toyotas like Barbie dolls.

Blogs shouldn't go on and on. There are such lovely people out there: highway patrol men and women. I will never in my life forget, "It doesn't matter," that I don't have my driver's license.

Tow truck drivers who "love" their work.'' Angels.

Free hot chocolate.

I hope our car is totaled.

Another thing I've learned is that I no longer want a Fiat 500. We would have been flattened in that little tin can.

Thank you, Lord, for everything.