I decided to call back the police dispatcher and send a bunch of pizzas to the mechanics.
Mostly to say thanks.
And also to assuage a mild case of guilt I’d developed for having written off the entire southeastern United States.
You know, NASCAR country.
More on that in a minute.
First, I received exactly the call I did not want.
“Uh, yeah,” my daughter began. “The car quit running, and we’re stuck on the side of the road.”
Shit.
My wife and daughter were making the drive back to the University of Tennessee following Christmas break.
A break that had lasted nearly six weeks.
Why in the hell would they give college kids that much time off?
What purpose did it serve?
I mean, I doubt many of them were returning to the family farm to help bring in the harvest.
Anyway, it was a sufficiently long period of time to cause my daughter to lobby my wife to bring her car home for the holidays.
Bad idea, I thought.
The car, a 2016 Nissan Versa, was purchased for my daughter’s sixteenth birthday.
It’s a little Japanese job with go-cart wheels and a lawnmower engine.
It was never intended for road trips.
It was intended for knocking around town.
That’s it.
But, of course, in the eyes of a teenager, any car is road trip-worthy.
We’ve all been there.
Still.
Why does a kid need a car at college in the first place?
A decent pair of shoes and a bus pass should work just fine, right?
But, following my daughter’s freshman year, both she and my wife decided the car was a necessity.
“You don’t understand,” my wife had said. “What if she wants to go to the gym at night? Do you really want her taking a bus?”
I mean . . .
Whatever.
Pick your battles, right?
If the car was going with my daughter to college, some seven hundred miles away, I wanted a mechanic to look it over and give it a clean bill of health.
My wife took it to the local shop, and it was declared fit for travel.
That was at the start of the semester.
Now, five months later, it was stuck on the shoulder off I-64, just outside Lexington, Kentucky, decidedly unfit.
Are you all way off the expressway? I asked.
Do you have your hazards on?
Can people see you?
Yes, yes, and yes, my daughter answered.
But the shoulder was narrow, and the car sat in the middle of a wide turn just before an exit.
Not a great place to be.
“Every time a truck passes, it rocks the whole car sideways,” my daughter added.
I called the insurance company’s roadside assistance service and got a tow truck on the way.
It was supposed to arrive in about an hour.
That’s a long time to sit on an expressway with semis screaming by, I thought.
Do you feel safe? I asked my wife.
“Yeah, I suppose . . .” she said.
I decided I was uncomfortable enough with the situation to call the cops.
Get a cruiser out there with its lights on to alert drivers coming around the turn, I thought.
Rather than call Nine-One-One, I found the number for the Lexington Police Department.
The dispatcher answered on the first ring.
Nobody answers on the first ring anymore, I thought.
Not a human, at least.
Nice touch.
I explained the situation as best I could, trying to minimize the sound of agitation in my voice.
I’m calling from Kansas City, I said. But my wife and daughter are stuck outside Lexington.
Once the dispatcher got the details she needed, she said an officer would be on his way.
I relayed that to my wife and asked her to let me know when the cop and tow truck arrived.
Both did so at about the same time, and the officer and tow truck driver could not have been friendlier or more professional.
The tow truck driver attempted to deliver my daughter’s car to a Nissan dealership whose service department had already closed.
No dice.
He then pressed on to a nearby Firestone, where manager Donnie Baker was willing to take a look.
Being in the South, of course he went by Donnie.
Not Don or Donald.
Things must have been slow at the Firestone, because Donnie and his guys immediately went to work on diagnosing the problem.
In short order, they got the car running and were doing test laps around the parking lot.
My wife put Donnie on speaker phone as he shared his findings.
“Probably the modules,” he said. “We’re getting some codes we can’t read. But, more than likely, the modules aren’t talking to each other the way they’re supposed to.”
Not having an ounce of mechanical knowledge or capability, I politely asked Donnie to explain what modules were.
In essence, he said, the car’s three brains weren’t communicating with each other via electrical signals the way they were supposed to.
“Could be a loose connection somewhere,” he said.
When the car was jolted onto the back of the tow truck, it must have reestablished whatever lost connection had caused the car to fail on my wife and daughter.
“I think you’re good to keep going,” he said. “Just get it to the dealership as soon as you get to Knoxville.”
Okay, I thought. End of story.
Donnie and his guys had spent nearly an hour looking over the car but wouldn’t accept any kind of payment.
“No, no,” he said. “We didn’t fix anything.”
Still, time is money, right?
When he continued to refuse, I asked if I could send over some pizzas.
Would that be alright?
Sure, he said.
Who doesn’t like pizza?
So, I got that figured out.
And then I wanted to do something nice for the police, who had also impressed me with their professionalism and kindness.
Maybe I’ll just call back and say thanks, I thought.
They probably don’t get thanked very often.
So, I did, and the dispatcher seemed to appreciate the gesture.
I started to feel relieved.
Especially considering that, incredibly, the parents of one of my daughter’s friends, who lived in Knoxville, decided to take off driving to Lexington the moment they heard of the car troubles.
My wife had been in touch with them because they’d all planned to get together that evening when my wife and daughter got to town.
She’d been sending them updates from the Firestone.
We hadn’t asked them to do so, but these incredibly kind people had decided to caravan with my wife and daughter through the mountains from Lexington to Knoxville.
They had backup.
Turns out, they needed it.
The car quit again an hour short of its destination.
The second tow truck didn’t arrive until nearly midnight.
And then, Monday morning, I got the news from the Nissan dealer in Knoxville that the car’s transmission would need to be replaced.
Fantastic.
But so be it.
I was just happy to have my wife and daughter safe, thanks in no small part to the kindness of the good people of Lexington, Kentucky, and our friends in Knoxville.
And that’s a lesson.
For me, at least.
My daughter remarked upon returning to Kansas City following her second semester at the University of Tennessee that, “This place sure isn’t the South.”
Of course not.
But how so?
“People aren’t nearly as nice,” she said. “No one says hello to you when you’re walking down the street.”
Interesting.
The Midwest has a reputation for being nice.
Was she saying the South was nicer?
“Totally,” she said. “Not even close.”
Following the whole car fiasco, I’m beginning to understand.
See, I’ve spent time in the South and have known plenty of people from the region through the years.
I can’t say I’ve ever had a bad experience there or found any of its inhabitants disagreeable.
But I have harbored a growing sense that the place, and its people, aren’t for me.
It’s likely a sense borne of the amalgam of the various stories of I’ve read and the region’s general portrayal in the press over the past decade.
All of which is biased, at the very least, and, quite possibly, completely inaccurate.
I know that.
And I also know there are kind, generous people south of the Mason-Dixon line.
Probably lots of them.
And assholes like me would do well to remember that.
Particularly when their wives and daughters are stuck on the side of an expressway outside Lexington, Kentucky, in a go-cart with a lawnmower engine.
I still don’t love the idea of my daughter’s having a car at college that was never intended to leave our town.
But, if she must,
I suppose I’m glad
It’s in the South.
Go Vols!