My child and I had an errand or two to take care of the other day. The last couple were on a college campus. By the time we reached the last errand, I couldn’t make said child go back in one more time. He’d had all he could handle of strangers, waiting, walking and bureaucracy. So I told him to wait in the car while I dashed back in. I found the office I was looking for and met the newest of a string people heading it up. I was brief. I talked to the woman for less than 10 minutes. We didn’t even sit down.

Thomas was sitting in the car, listening to the radio when I got back. Of course, when I go to start the car, it just goes click, click, click. We don’t want to call for help, again. This is the fourth time this year someone’s had to come jumpstart the Versa. But we’re stuck. I call AAA, and they are very nice and promise to have someone out in an hour and a half, which is an hour more than we have. We have to call the husband. He hates to come to that campus because it is weirdly laid out and he can never find anything there. And he has to leave work to come. And he’s tired of rescuing us so often. Consequently, by the time he gets there in his much more reliable, twenty-year-old Maxima, he’s already all grumpy.

Just to add the icing to the cake, of course, we are parked nose-in, in a space next to a wide berm. With cars on either side.

Nothing to do but push it out of the space so that we can reach the battery. My two guys start pushing the car out of the space, while I am doing my best to turn it toward a curb so the parking lot traffic could get by us. Add in that the power steering doesn’t work without the battery, of course, so steering the thing backwards over to the curb was going to be tricky, even if we’d had a lot of room to maneuver. Which we did not.

Just as we are starting this procedure, suddenly the traffic in the parking lot is twice as heavy and worse than awful. Because of course, when I have to get rescued, I like to make it as difficult as possible. Thus, just for maximum comedic value, we are trying to back up two cars in a campus parking lot, at the most popular class change time, 10:30 AM.

There I am, manhandling the steering wheel as best I can but still not turning enough and the Versa hits the curb instead of lining up nicely beside it. We call it good, because students are dashing around and between us and fighting over our newly emptied space. One squeezed his car across the path of the Maxima as it was backing up to get in line with the Versa. There was almost a wreck. I mean, the Maxima was OBVIOUSLY going backwards. The kid couldn’t wait the 3 seconds for our car to stop? So Husband was really grumpy by then.

There’s the usual jumper cable business, and eventually, we did get the car started. The child and I decided we needed something to perk us up after that adventure. We stopped at Sonic to get hot fudge cake sundaes and onion rings to console ourselves. The perky little car hop brought us our stuff and offered us catsup, which we didn’t need, and then bopped off before we realized we had no spoons or napkins. It was that kind of day. We just brought our ice cream home. That was all the fun we could stand in one day.