When the Rubber Hits the Road

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit. D. Elton Trueblood

The other day I was headed home from my weekly book study group. The streets were damp from a light drizzle that had recently fallen. I was driving uphill, so as I rounded a corner I added a smidge more gas with the accelerator and felt the tires spin. 

When I got home I walked around the truck and gave the tires a close inspection. They still had plenty of tread on them; I have really stopped doing much driving, what with retirement and the pandemic-induced home-body I’ve become. The problem wasn’t the quality or depth of the tread, so I had to delve deeper into the mystery of the spinning rubber.

Ah; rubber! I put my tactile sensors to work and, lo, there it was! The tires may not have had much wear, but they were getting a bit long in the tooth, so to speak. I felt around and discerned they had lost their elasticity. They’d become like old pencils whose erasers only smudge the marks one is trying to clean up or, worse yet, tear the paper when one rubs too hard.

The tread is willing, I mused, but the grip is weak.

With winter making its approach, I decided to run down to the local tire center and get some replacements. They cost more than I’d wanted to spend, of course, but the peace of mind that comes with a fraction more traction is priceless. 

The lobby was fairly still and subdued. A television was tuned to a sports channel. The volume was low, but the voices of the on-air opinionists would puncture the quiet every now and then as if screaming opinions would make them sound more believable. Fortunately, God blessed me with a capacity to tune out the pontification of pundits – it’s my superpower.

I scrolled through my phone to pass away the time as the waiting room had no magazines with which to thumb through. It may seem more sanitary that way, but I think customer sanity is being overlooked. Nevertheless, as I scrolled, a gentleman ambled up to where I was sitting and began to make small-talk.

For those who don’t know me, I confess I’ve never been good at small talk. Once I get past the current weather conditions, my quiver of conversational arrows is empty. I think social anxiety sends any freshly oxygenated blood straight from my head to my toes so that the relative vacuum that normally exists between my ears becomes super-charged, causing eyes, ears, and lips to close, and my soul to spin away into the remaining Twilight Zone of my existence.

Against that impulse for survival, however, I found myself looking into the gentleman’s eyes (for he was wearing a mask). It wasn’t chit-chat he was after. 

I closed the news app I’d been perusing and slipped my phone into my pocket. We continued to exchange a few pleasantries, and then the conversation went deeper. The details are unimportant, but I learned the gentleman lives alone. His wife is in memory care and he is approaching ninety. He wasn’t being gabby, it turns out; he was just thankful that his leaky tire had gotten him out of his empty house. He was hungry for company.

“Company.” The root of the word is “pan,” bread. In a world where pundits scream at one another, where politicians lie about one another, where people bury their noses in their phones and flip one another off on the road, my friend just hungered to make a connection that didn’t involve radio waves or electronic wizardry. 

As he got ready to leave (once the nail had been removed from his tire and patched “good as new”) we wished each other well. He had air in his tires and a spring in his step.

The problem with our world is that we spend too much time spinning our wheels.  My truck needed new tires; I needed a new attitude! A better attitude could help us get to where we’re going (and give us better traction, to boot) whenever the rubber hits the road here in this, our valley.

Keith Axberg writes on matters concerning life and faith. Author of: Who the Blazes is Jesus? Good News for a Vulgar World (available through Amazon in Print and e-book)