Life is unpredictable. And the events of our lives should not be evaluated as good or bad, though it is so tempting to do that.
I was turning into my driveway one day this summer when I looked in the mirror to see a woman bearing down on me with no intention to stop. I gunned it but too late. Wham! An older woman stepped out from behind the wheel of the car which had hit me. Her first words were “Christmas is coming.” Her first thought was she was going to have to pay me for a big repair bill and as a result, would have no money for Christmas, five months away.
Because the damage was not extensive, no one was injured and there had been no public property damage, there was no need to call the police. Or the insurance companies. The woman was relieved by that. She promised to pay me for the repairs and I took her phone number. She went on her way.
She took to dropping in about once a week after that, to see how the car situation was coming along. As it happened, we are both great chatters and so we covered a lot of ground whenever she came around. It took me a while to get the estimates, but I got three. The lowest was $350 and the other two were over $600. But I had been told to stay away from the $350 guy and I told her that. So, she was looking at a bill of more than $600, and those were just estimates.
But the back bumper she had hit was hardly damaged at all. All that could be seen looked like a bullet hole, maybe one I had picked up as I raced away from a girlfriend’s home after her husband came home unexpectedly. But that bullet hole was not the only blemish on our buggy. It was scraped from stem to stern and while it’s a great car mechanically, it is no beauty queen. So, to fix the bullet hole would have been like squeezing a whitehead on a teenager’s pimple-filled face.
The notion started to build in my mind that it wasn’t worth fixing. Still, she did cause it …
I saw her one day this fall in a fast food restaurant where I had gotten my morning coffee and was looking for a place to sit. So I sat down with her and she asked immediately about the car.
“Listen,” I said. “About that. We have decided not to get it repaired.”
Tears filled her eyes. I carried on. “Maybe if it was a fantastic, expensive car, we would, but it just isn’t worth it.” And I told her that she needn’t worry about it any more. Even if we changed our mind and fixed it someday, we wouldn’t come back to her.
The rest of the conversation was about everything except the car. Two more times I have seen her there and sat with her as we drank our coffee. During our last meeting, the subject of the accident never even came up.
I have to say, this was one of the more unusual ways I’ve ever made a friend, but the result has been good – for both of us, I believe. I have found someone who will sit still while I tell her my goofy stories. And she found someone whose been given so many breaks in his life, it didn’t hurt him at all to give one back.
I hope she had a good Christmas.
©2015 Jim Hagarty
