Stuck
Andrew gets stuck in a ditch on a busy day
I draw blood when slicing my morning bagel.
I sit in the wrong pew. Twice.
I take our peaceful infant son into my arms, and he bawls.
And now, the speed walkers gawk and take photographs. The crime scene cleaner can’t help me. The wife says my timing is atrocious.
It’s October 31, 2021, confirmation day for Rana, my oldest daughter, and the two-year anniversary of that morning we stood in a Seattle court and proclaimed ourselves family. Later in the evening, I’ll accompany my three oldest kids—an angel, a construction worker, and a contractor—as we celebrate by knocking on doors and receiving candy.
This is the year that we are nomads. We will live in eight-and-a-half different roofed structures as we finish the troubled remodel of our new house. Corrigan is born while we are staying in the home of our pastor friends, Bryon and Britt.
And because we are nomads, it is another moving day, another day in which our family of six has to pack up our belongings and shuttle them to the next stop before we can one day settle into a home.
And because moving is hard, the entire family is swept up in a foul cloud of stress. And that cloud has followed me here, to this ditch, where my tires spin but I can’t get any traction.
Beyond my parents’ truck, which has the listing look of a sinking ship, there’s some grass, a fence, and the middle school field. If I climbed into the truck bed and then on top of the cab, I could make out some of the players in Hiroshi’s game. He’ll win 2–1, but I will not be there to see.
I lean on the truck, and the sun warms my back. For a minute, I lay my head on the bed rail. This feels wrong, like it should be raining sheets, and it occurs to me that this is the first moment in a long while in which I am not doing something, in which I am alone with my thoughts—no children to demand attention, no work to accomplish, no screen to veg away the hours—just me, the sun, and that spiral of stress that’s taken residence in my belly.
A guy with a Nissan Leaf pulls up and volunteers to help, but we agree that his car lacks the guts to do the job.
Ten Latino men pile out of a van and attempt to push me out while I gun it in reverse.
The crime scene cleaner has a crew cut and a big rig with one of those push bumper grills in case he needs to double as a bulldozer. He parks beside me and jumps out of the vehicle. He and his passenger circle my dad’s truck. They whistle and nod, and I’m reminded of the iconic scene from The Wire in which two detectives just repeat a single curse word in different intonations as they look for clues at the site of a murder.
The crime scene cleaner tells me that he learned his craft in the Marines, that, yes, he’s seen some nasty stuff, that he can’t pull me out, and that I need to tell the tow truck driver to go slow because there’s a good chance that my axlespaxeldifferentialIdidntunderstandallthewords might get damaged.
Take pictures, he says.
The app says the tow truck driver is still another hour and a half away.
A stately looking fellow walks by and tells me that I’m the third car to get stuck here this week. I don’t dare to ask whether the other two made it out in one piece.
When Matthew the tow truck driver finally arrives, I learn that Erica has to be with the car in order for AAA to help me—it doesn’t matter that both our names are on the credit card; she’s the one with a policy.
After several phone calls, and my talk of infants and moving days, he gets his supervisor to allow it, and thus begins a series of day-saving mechanical acrobatics that Matthew apparently learned from a YouTuber in Ocean City who pulls people off beaches for a living.
The truck is saved.
The marriage is intact.
We manage to get most of our stuff moved.
The teenagers and threenager have a blast ringing doorbells and, in one case, turning a strangers door knob. We all get cokes from the house who hadn’t seen a trick-or-treater in three years.
The infant gives me what passes for a smile.
I fall asleep as the contestants on The Great British Baking Show try to make some kind of desserty chandelier.
Later I write this on my iPhone in second person. I say “You draw blood” and “Your wife is upset.” I hope that when I write my words are universal through the particular, and the second-person trick is a way to more directly fashion that link.
But it doesn’t feel right. I realize it is a way of distancing myself from my own experience.
And this is me. This is what it’s like to be me on a sunny Sunday in October 2021, to feel some combination of stuck and saved, sun and shade, to be grateful and overwhelmed, alone and in a community of helpers, at home and adrift.