The festival of life
I spent a good deal of the rainy morning in Sault Ste. Marie in the US getting my oil changed and tires rotated. I’ve been trying to be amiable and patient with crabby people, but still find myself getting irritated when, for example, the service techs abandon the project of working on my car in favor of one more inexcusably overweight and slovenly man with, you guessed it, a grossly oversized pickup, and the bony alpha tech glares at me, who am I to wonder what is taking so very long and shrewdly slams closed the door to the shop so he can make his sneaky decisions favoring white guys without my scrutiny. This is hard to write, weeks later in Ireland where every single person I have met over the past five days has gone out of their way to be helpful and kind. As I had an appointment that day and the services took inexplicably than promised, the manager who checked me in and out was apologetic. It was probably his inclination to at last let me get on my way that caused him to overlook the issue that would haunt me when he reviewed my checklist and told me all was well and I was at last good to go. He was a pretty nice fellow, so when I called the next morning after looking over the checkpoint results to inquire what it meant that my battery was too unstable to test, I accepted his apology for the inconvenience (and anxiety) it would cause me. However, when I called right back I knew I had the misfortune of the other guy answering, the guy with the dark countenance and the furrowed brow milling about looking angry, the man who seemed easily capable of murder. When I asked if it was possibly a mistake, I’d seen them training anew lad and maybe he didn’t know how to test a battery, the potential serial killer hung up on me. I guess that was obnoxious of me and I ruminated on it for a few days, excusing his behavior as warranted. Now, writing this weeks later in Ireland among good-natured folk, people who are not pissy, demanding, and sneaky, I am beginning to feel differently about what behavior is excusable. Not that mine was. I was seeking assurance that my car was going to start each time I needed it to on that stormy day as I navigated across a long stretch of rural land in Canada sans repair shops and populated by people who not only spoke another language, but who were not even able to procure a battery on a Sunday. But perhaps the bottom line was that my question came across as blaming and confrontational. I do want to refine myself to be what I feel is a “better” person, the best version of myself, but honestly sometimes I wish the critic in my head would give me a day off. What were the dynamics of our aborted exchange? Maybe his wife was cheating on him and he’d had it with women.
