I’ve just survived a trip with my cousin, Carolyn. We share many family traits, including a gene that creates calamity and another that makes us laugh at whatever befalls us. We also both have rheumatoid arthritis.
The trip—to the wedding of another cousin’s daughter in southern Connecticut—was to have been a quick one. My cousin met me at our home in Saco, Maine, and we started out at 3:30 p.m. Saturday with plans to spend the night at my brother’s house in central Connecticut, attend the wedding, and return home Sunday afternoon. As we neared Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the red light indicating that the car was overheating began blicking on and off. My husband, John, when I called him, advised us to turn around and come home immediately. After consulting with a mechanic who said we could “probably” make it, we drove on to Haverill, Massachusetts. (We ignored the mechanic’s advice to resolve the problem by driving as fast as possible.) At that point, the red warning light not only remained lit but seemed to glow more brightly than before.
I stopped at a call box and summoned help. Soon afterward, a state trooper pulled alongside our car and asked what our problem was. I explained about the red light, and he echoed my husband’s advice. (When I told the trooper of the mechanic’s tip to drive as fast as possible, he suggested—strongly—that we follow the speed limit.) I asked the trooper if he thought we would definitely make it back to Portsmouth. “Because,” I explained, “that’s where we were when I called my husband and he said we should turn around right then and come home.” Not one to get involved in marital disputes when he didn’t have to, the trooper threw up his hands and said, “I’m not getting into that one!”
Fortunately we made it all the way home. But that wasn’t the end of the story. We borrowed my husband’s car and set out once again on our journey. By then it was 8:30 p.m., and John scored us both in the negative numbers on the sanity scale. We finally rolled into my brother’s driveway at 1 a.m. Fortunately for him, he was away and had instructed us where to find the key.
Disregarding the rooster that woke us at 5 a.m., the fact that I locked myself out of my brother’s house at 5:30 a.m., and the pipe that fell off my husband’s car on the way home, we had a great time.
As we rolled by Kittery for the fourth time in 24 hours, Carolyn intoned, “I bet we’re the only two women in the world who have driven through Kittery [home of more than 120 outlet stores] four times without ever stepping foot in a shop.”
For someone else, perhaps, the trip would have been a disaster. We wisecracked all the way home, stiff joints and all. Life is like that: It happens whether you laugh or cry. I prefer to laugh.