Summer days of extraordinary circumstance
Mid-July we lost our passenger side mirror. Not lost, broke. Well, we didn’t break it. It broke. Something broke it. I don’t really know what happened. I wasn’t there. My wife was. She also doesn’t know what happened. She looked over and it was broken. She pulled over and got out and looked, no sign of what happened.
She pulled over near the home of my old-man-walking-to-work-friend Bill. I see him on his back deck when I go to or from the bus stop most days. A few days before the mirror incident he told me his wife was probably dying soon. I frowned and nodded and said “I’m sorry” and he pointed to the sky and said “it’s in his hands now.” I’ve brought him - Bill, I mean - some home-made sauerkraut twice, and we’ve talked home repairs and he’s compliment my kids.
My wife was worried she’d somehow whacked the mirror on a parked car. Bill didn’t see that happen. He said ‘what you looking for?’ and she explained the situation and he said ‘maybe it was a bird!’ I’m inclined toward rock. In any case, the mirror’s busted.
There’s that cliche about how you don’t miss something until it’s gone. That’s me with the mirror. Maybe it’s a a life-course thing, I’m getting old so looking to the right more… and in keeping with the spirit of the times now when I look right I see a hollowed out black shell. Meanwhile when I look left I see the past that I’ve already left behind. (I’m sorry. For those political jokes, but also as existential condition.)
We’ve had a season of car losses. Our last car died. The mechanic said the car was falling apart from nearly 20 years of midwestern weather. He said fixing one thing could lead to something else breaking and it could easily end up costing twelve hundred bucks, “and this car is not worth twelve hundred bucks,” he said. He didn’t charge me, which makes me think he’s a nice guy though he did punch his assistant while I was there, not playfully either but like a punch with intent, shouting “you motherfucker, I ought to knock your fucking teeth out” because of some thing I didn’t understand about an air hose. I didn’t know how to respond and it makes ‘nice guy’ a harder assessment to sustain and I am, in good middle class fashion, considering taking my business elsewhere.
My middle brother drove us up a van from down south to replace our car. He’d bought it to fix up and sell. He was going to undersell himself on it; I made him tell me his cost for the van and travel so I could at least make sure he broke even. That was twenty six hundred bucks. Then our roof sprang a leak and a gutter started falling off. We’ve had big storms and frequently lately, lots of hail rattling out of the sky. That means more work for roofers and fewer work days, demand up supply down, prices high. It took weeks to get someone out to give me an estimate and it’s another twenty four hundred bucks. We have it, but, we won’t soon once the roof’s fix, and that’s what my dad would call a big chunk of coin.
What with the roof expense I wanted to save a bit so I decided to try to fix the broken passenger side mirror myself. I watched a couple youtube videos - you can tell they’re reputable because they’re on the World Wide Web - on mirror replacement and then popped the broken mirror assembly off. I was struck that the assembly looks like cheap plastic to me.
I put the assembly and mirror in a plastic grocery bag. The glass on the mirror (ex-mirror? dozen small useless mirrors?) was spiderwebbed and a few chunks of glass were missing. I jammed a screwdriver into one of the gaps in the glass and pushed, peeling the adhesive backing on the glass off of the plastic assembly. I used a pliers to grab onto bits of the glass and pull them off, basically tearing up the adhesive backing. Most but not all of the glass stayed in the plastic bag. In retrospect I should have worn gloves and safety goggles. (I typoed that as satety goggles and thought ‘satiety goggles, someone should invent those, so you look at stuff and feel satisfied.’ Is that what Google Glass does?) I don’t want you to worry, reader, so I will tell you that despite the unfavorable odds I got through unscathed.
After while between the screwdriver, pliers, and exacto knife I got the ex-mirror off the assembly. I tossed the old mirror in the trash, swept up, then soaked the assembly in some goo-gone and scrubbed the last of the adhesive off. I went to the auto parts store for replacement glass but they didn’t have the right size. I ordered it, should be in after 2 or 3 days. I had to pay in advance, eighty bucks. As I drove home, I thought “shit it is disorienting not having that mirror!” and also “if it all works out I will be glad I didn’t go to a mechanic; I worry I’ll fuck this up and still end up needing a mechanic.”
I was pleased that I got all the broken glass and shit taken care of without incident. After I washed up my middle kid asked for a sliced apple. I cut one up for her and slipped, giving myself a shallow half inch long cut on the palm of my hand. This is probably a metaphor of some kind, or maybe it’s like a simile.
By a couple days later the cut was slightly infected, probably from reaching my hands into a sink full of dirty dishes a million times. Our dishwasher was broken too and we hadn’t gotten it fixed because we wanted to get the roof fixed first. Money is a bunch of bullshit, I wish I had more of it, or that society didn’t have it altogether.
I spent a few days looking for a decent analogy or moral lesson that could maybe redeem the finger situation, make it edifying - maybe some renewed or increased sense of self-efficacy after fixing the mirror? - or maybe some pointed turn of phrase or punch line to make it all a set up with a worthwhile pay off. I kept trying to find one and failing and then, sour grapes, saying to myself that that would be just another consolation prize anyway, just (I was having big Situationist feelings, brought on by the midsummer heat and incessant layer of sweat) sugarcoating survival. Never-ending small thefts and boxed-in horizons and sharing inappropriately with strangers.
The closest I got was a general direction for a possible joke riffing on home fermentation of sauerkraut as a metaphor for my life-stage. I never got further than that. Perhaps you can finish it, reader. You are in effect a microbe to me, technically alive but in no way that I can understand or bring myself to care about, while, be honest, this is all just so much chopped cabbage to you; chew it over, make something of it (like I’ve made you into a mirror that show me the ways in which I am a pickled vegetable, more sour by the day).
In addition to the sauerkraut I made a fair bit of home-made yogurt over the summer, and my wife began home-brewing kombucha - which to my great regret I learned I like. I hoped all that fermentation would lead to a robust intestinal ecosystem to offset my poisoned heart, the sort of heart that asks “do you really think cultivating microbial fauna adds up to a life?”
The auto parts store never called me about the mirror so I stopped in a week later. I affixed the new mirror in the store parking lot and it’s as good as the old one. A few days after that I had lunch with a work friend - one of those rare work friends who you hope to become actual friends with - to celebrate her taking a new job out of state.
She drove, and I saw that her passenger side mirror was broken. I asked what happened and she didn’t know. A mechanic had quoted her five hundred bucks to fix it. “I did mine for eighty five,” I said, “with the help of youtube. You could too, I am sure of it.” She looked doubtful. I tried not to look smug at my having saved up four hundred and fifteen dollars.
I managed to fix our dishwasher as well; the drain hose needed to be moved and hung up higher. And then one day from his porch while I walked home from the bus Bill called out that he liked my sauerkraut, liked it so much he ate half the jar of it with fork - “I had just opened it up to take one bite to try and it was so good I just kept going!” and that it reminded him of what his grandma used to make.
Small victories, unending war.