Rubber Enemy Number One

Last Wednesday, Farmer H and I headed to our newest favorite casino. We only decided the night before. Normally, I like a few days to savor the upcoming excitement. It's not like I have much else to keep the days from running together now. This time, though, I had an unspecified sense of foreboding. I almost decided to cancel out. But you know Mrs. HM and casinos!

I even told Farmer H, on the drive, that I had a note card with my prescriptions listed on it. "I'm putting this in my gambling purse. We're not getting any younger. You never know when something could happen. We don't know each others' medicine."  He agreed, and said he would get a printout from his pharmacy. He also informed me the he was paid three months ahead for his Storage Unit Store rent.

As usual, we took A-Cad. The drive is about 30 miles on two-lane blacktop, and the other 50 miles on a divided interstate highway. We were on that highway, perhaps a two-thirds of the way to the casino, when it happened.

Silly me. I had put two books in my bag, to finish reading on the drive, having started them on other casino or Pony-visiting trips. Wouldn't you know it? When I pulled out those books to read, and keep my mind off of Farmer H's sweaving...I discovered that I HAD already finished them! So that left me nothing to do but sit and talk to Farmer H. His captive audience.

BAM!

What in the Not-Heaven? I just knew I'd been hit by something! I looked at the hood of A-Cad. I looked up at the ceiling. I even turned to look behind us, to see if any car parts had fallen off, or if there was a hole in the metal, about to suck everything out like in that Airport movie from 1970, based on the Arthur Hailey book. Farmer H was looking in the mirrors, trying to figure out what happened.

"Huh. That guy blew a tire. That big truck."

Thank the Gummi Mary, it was going the other way, across the median, on the other side of the divided highway. Still, a chunk of it could have shot across and beaned us. We saw a section of that tire on the way home, and Farmer H had to swerve around it. The only good thing about riding with a Master Sweaver.

"That reminds me of the time I drove a little old lady schoolteacher to St. Louis to visit her husband in the hospital. She couldn't drive up there, so I said I'd take her. We were behind a pickup truck, and I could see the spare tire underneath jouncing around every time he hit a bump. Going across a concrete bridge, it bounced out, hit the right side of the bridge, and ricocheted across the hood of my car!"

"Another time, when I was a kid, we were driving behind a truck, and it had a blowout, and the piece of tire just missed us!"

"Wow. I don't know if I want to ride with you any more. You're a tire magnet!"
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Let the record show that when we still lived in my $17,000 house in town, Farmer H was driving his own truck home from work, pulling his own trailer, on the interstate less than a mile from our turnoff, when his trailer lost a tire. It kept rolling, came alongside, and passed up his truck. It went into the median, down an embankment between two highway bridges, and into the river.