A Small Ordeal

A foul sort of day, rainy, blustery and of course for me, cold. Sixty something degrees.

It's a smidgen short of eleven in the morning and we've already had a small adventure.

RTGFKAR got the call at 7:30. The driver of the ARC Mandarin truck said they had arrived in Boquete and needed us to direct them further. We hopped in RTGFKAR's car and headed to the park to meet them. Loaded on the truck were our shower stalls and a couple of bathroom mirrors. We had arranged this delivery yesterday in David and although we were prepared for the early morning call, we really didn't expect the truck to be on time. They seldom are.

We made the connection and led the way to our house. The road there as some of you know is, ah, dreadful. Especially when it is raining and it was. Doing that. Hard. We crawled along over the rocks and through the mud and got the clunky looking, box truck to the site. Our goods were unloaded, checked, signed for and all seemed well. Well, that is, until the delivery truck bogged down in the mud at the turnaround spot. Alrighty then. Not to worry. Mighty Mitsu to the rescue.

RTGFKAR's car is a Mitsubishi Nativa. A four wheel drive SUV. These kind of cars are technically classified as trucks, but if you ask me - and somebody should - they are really just glorified station wagons. I wasn't sure we could help, but of course we had to try. I got the car turned around up by our house so that I could pull down the drive and park in front of the the truck. No one had a chain but the truck guys came up with a rope and we hooked on. I dropped the gears into four wheel low, eased forward and, eureka, pulled them right out! We weren't done though. The truck still had to turn around in the turnaround and when it was finally pointed in the right direction it was, ta daa, stuck again. Still not to worry, we hooked up and yanked them out anew.

The surprising thing to me apart from the car actually pulling this large truck from the mud, was the attitude of the truck's occupants, a driver and a helper. They remained cheerful and seemingly undisturbed throughout. I thought back to how I would have acted at a similar age, twenty something, and the picture I conjured of my truck stuck in the mud on a rainy day, deliveries backing up, was not that of the proverbial happy camper. I would have been, okay what's the word I need, angry. Very angry. Extremely angry. The kind of angry I never actually get at other people. It's a kind of mad anger reserved exclusively for things that don't do what they are supposed to. It's a real mad, a murderous mad. Afortunadamente,I'm better now. Age has tempered the temper. I realize that those inanimate objects that so pissed me off in the past meant well all along. They were just doing their thing, being things. So I was impressed by the truck driver and his helper's steady calmness throughout our small ordeal. Their Wah, their Zen, their evolution was far ahead of mine at a similiar age. (But then, who's isn't? Wasn't?)

None of this is what I intended to write about this morning. It's just another distraction. What I intended to write about you'll get tomorrow.

If I'm not distracted.