Felix the hero in Indiana

A trip saved with kindness to spare

If listening works best for you today, please enjoy my audio voiceover above. 👆

We leave home intentionally early, the way you do the day before a holiday, when everyone is either determined to be together or determined to escape, and especially when traffic where you’re headed can be terrible even on an ordinary day.

We don’t make it an hour.

As a guy who learned to drive in New York, my hubby knows something about making your move in traffic. But he cuts a turn a little too sharply and feeds one of our tires to the ragged jaws of the roadside. It’s a very specific sound and sensation, one that makes you suck in air through your teeth, and exhale “Shit,” even though the baby Jesus is so close to being born he can hear you.

Sure enough, we’re instantly disabled on a major road, the driver’s side tire showing zero pressure, traffic whizzing past at speed. We pull as far as we dare onto the shoulder, given the soggy surrounds, our fully packed vehicle wobbling like a newborn lamb as cars scream past. I feel my body tighten into that peculiar mix of alertness and helplessness and wonder if this is a sign from the universe that we should have stayed home.

I don’t want to call attention to either my privilege or my profound ineptitude when it comes to auto mechanics, but I need to acknowledge that the money we spend on our yearly AAA membership pays for itself many times over. Locked out of a car because the battery’s dead? Call them. Stranded on I-95 on a broiling Virginia summer day? Call them. Christmas Eve? Definitely call them.

Even the automated operators there talk slowly, presumably in an effort to project calm. “Are you somewhere safe?” asks Heather. Or Charlotte. Or Miranda, who also wants to know if the respondent can change the tire safely when they arrive. I tell her no. She says she’ll send a tow truck, that it will take forty-five minutes, and asks where we’d like the car taken.

Half the town we just left is already closed for the holiday. She explains, deliberately, that only one of us can ride with the driver and asks if we’d like a $20 Lyft coupon for the other person? I imagine all one of the Lyft drivers in the area sipping eggnog on his couch, in pajamas, phone on silent. I thank her and explain, less than slowly, that we’ll call back.

While I start dialing tire places—most unanswered—Jim shoves the contents of our trunk into the back seat. What won’t fit flaps aimlessly in the stiff wind on the side of the road. Suitcases, bags, the detritus of a pending holiday visit.

He unearths the donut spare, says the jack is missing, checks the manual, finds the jack but discovers that the lever needed to actually operate it is missing. This is the car our daughter left behind when she moved abroad, leaving us to wander the foreign lands of a vehicle we never really got to know.

Praise be, he’s brought his trusty tool bag and has pliers!

But when he kneels beside the car, his shoe hangs over the white line of the shoulder, and I protest. Traffic is unrelenting. He claims he’s ducking off the road as needed, only resuming efforts when there’s a break in the flow. He doesn’t mean to lie. How do you actually change a tire in 20 second spurts?

At a certain point, I station myself behind the back bumper, gray hair blowing in the breeze, a sexagenarian flare. Most drivers are kind and move over. A few dudes in pickup trucks stay their course, a nod to the size of their own…tires. No one stops to ask how we’re doing, and I’m just glad we’re in this together.

Leaving the skin of a few knuckles behind, Jim finishes swapping out the tire and stuffs everything back in the car as I connect with another calming representative to cancel the tow.

I still haven’t found a service center that can help us. One guy, who sounds young enough to be my grandson (if I had one), tells me he has no idea why they’re even open on Christmas Eve and that he’s outta there as soon as possible. But before hanging up, he offers to come help us once he’s off at noon. With a smile that’s trying hard to turn into tears, I decline.

A few yards up the road, we regroup in the small, gravel parking lot of a long-defunct cat hospital. That’s when the tow driver, who’s spotted us from the road, turns up anyway, adds air to the spare, and tells us about a warehouse in Delaware that might have what we need. The man’s face is familiar, surely someone who has bailed us out of a car situation in the past. We press on.

A guy at Tire Rack tells me they have the model we need at a reasonable price, though I’d probably have paid whatever he asked at that point. Before I can seal the deal, the call drops.

Next, I get Felix, whose delivery, while not as measured as the folks at AAA, is even more calming. He explains that he and the previous rep are in Indiana, confirms that the tire we need is in stock, makes a joke about the weather. The call drops again.

This time Felix rings me back, offering his direct extension. I give him my credit card number, and the sale is final.

For a fleeting moment I marvel at going sixty miles an hour down a road in Maryland, on a donut spare, with a man who can MacGyver a jack lever with pliers, talking wirelessly to someone named Felix in South Bend, whose inventory system assures him that the tire we need—the one nobody else has—is available one state away, and that I can pay for it by reading some numbers aloud.

But there’s a hitch. Every good car story insists on one.

It’s 11:00 am, and the warehouse in Delaware closes at noon. We are at least an hour away. “They have things they have to do after 12:00,” Felix says with confidence. He suggests I call them when I’m about five minutes out. Before bidding goodbye, we wish each other a Merry Christmas, and I tell him how grateful I am for his help, a compliment he waves off as if it’s all in a day’s work.

A few minutes later, I see a missed call and a voicemail.

“Hey Elizabeth. I just got word—this is Felix at Tire Rack, by the way—I just got an email back from the guys at the warehouse who said, ‘Copy that.’ They’ll wait until you get there. So get there safe, more than fast. They’ll wait. I just wanted you to know that. Have a happy holiday. Take care!”

We arrive at 12:10 to a man ready with the tire, which he crams into the back seat, handing us a list of places nearby that can put it on for us. We try the closest one, practically across the street, and for $30, they install and balance the tire, wish us well and send us on our way. In the 40 minutes we’re there, we are their only customer.

When we finally get underway again, we’ve lost three hours. As anticipated, traffic in New York is terrible, and a trip that should have taken less than five hours takes nine.

It turns out to be worth it.

We were traveling toward people we love—one who hadn’t spoken to us in five years. There was history there and so much uncertainty, and for that part of the journey, we had no spare tire. All morning, as things went wrong and then right and then wrong again, I questioned our decision to go at all. Surely we were misreading something.

The thing about signs is that they mostly make sense in hindsight and not always reliably, given how prone we are to seeing what we want to see.

The reunion, when it came, was unremarkable in the best possible way. No drama. No reckoning. Just happy people in a room, good food on plates, time passing, hugs exchanged. No one involved had any idea what might be unfolding. They were just willing to do what they could with what they had to offer, and that was enough to get us where we were meant to go.

~Elizabeth

This piece ends up being about what happens when people decide to lean in, even when they don’t have to, even when it’s inconvenient. Though I don’t envision Chicken Scratch as a diary, this story felt too germane to this time in history to pass over.

I hope the year ahead brings us together in a movement of moments like this. I hope all the helpers show up and link arms—and I hope to meet you there.

If this piece sparked anything at all for you, I’d love to know that. You can like, share, or restack it (look for versions of these buttons: 💚 ♻️ 💬) — and I’d be so happy to meet you in the comments, especially if you’ve got a helper story to share, whether you were at the receiving or the giving end.

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Happy New Year! Thank you for all the ways you make this community of friends what it is. I’ll see you on the other side.