August 27, 2015 (Thursday)
It happens in the best of families. You take your seat behind the steering wheel, fasten your seat belt, insert the key, and start the car. But the car does not start. Instead it makes a sound like automated castanets. Actually the sound reminds me of a childhood toy that made the clacking sound that resembled a machine gun. The battery is dead. Without any warning whatsoever, it has died.
How rude at this hour
to deny me its power.
Stranded at home,
Never to roam,
My spirit’s beginning to sour.
I put the battery charger on it for hours. Does not help. I go to great pains to get the 
cable terminals and posts clean of all that corrosion, even using a steel-bristled brush. Still no start. Not to be defeated, I drag out my trusty wrenches, pliers and sockets. I’ll just take the battery out of the car, go buy a new one, and install it. Easy enough, right? Wrong. The one bolt that holds it in place has rusted and keeps turning like a mini merry-go-round. Wouldn’t you know it’s a special kind of bolt–irreplaceable, one of a kind, rusted, turning, going no where, like me. As I said, I’m stranded. But at least I’m stranded at home.
I have neither the tools nor the “know how” to free the critical part. A mechanic will help me, so Dwight pulls his car alongside mine, we jump start mine, and off I go to the shop for repairs. Turns out the cure for fixing that one-of-a-kind irreplaceable bolt was to cut it off and throw it away.
Is anything ever as easy as it seems? From a simple bolt to a repair job in the auto garage reminds me of a centuries-old proverb: “For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the man was lost.” During World War II, this verse was framed and hung on the wall of the Anglo-American Supply Headquarters in London, England. There must be a lesson in there somewhere for the rest of us.
Any article can be edited. If I edited this blog, it would read, “Charles had a dead battery and got a new one.” But if I did that, how would I fill the space for today’s blog?