In truth, it wasn’t really that funny at all. At the time, it was quite tragic. We had lived in Toronto for four years while Mike finished up his Chiropractic degree, with the plan to move back to Calgary to go into business with a chiropractic friend. We were poor as church mice during our tenure in Toronto. I was working to put Mike through college and for some insane reason we thought this might be a good time to have a baby. Well we had that baby and I returned to work at a wonderful place called the Four Seasons head office. I didn’t breathe a word about the fact that we were returning to Calgary in two years time. I decided to make it sound like this clever idea just came up a couple of months before Mike’s graduation. You’d have done the same thing.
Anyhoo, we didn’t really have all that much by way of worldly possessions…we had our clothes, our weddings gifts, our babies stuff and a few personal effects. Most of our furniture was dragged into our dwelling from someone’s front yard or back alley because that’s the way of things in Toronto. If you don’t want it, you haul it out into your front yard and scavengers like us come by at night and drag it home. So the furniture just went back out onto our front lawn and disappeared.
We did need a way to get our few things back to Calgary however and our car wasn’t large enough so Mike came up with the brilliant idea to purchase our landlords skidoo trailer and convert it into a homemade UHaul. I begged him not to do this thing. I implored that we just rent a Uhaul but he would have none of it. We were poor people and we had to do the most cost effective thing. So night after night I could hear him hammering and banging around in the driveway into the wee hours of the morning. I rather reminded me of Noah building the Ark. Neighbors gathered round to see what was being created. Mike built up the walls and even made the front roof portion slanted so there wouldn’t be so much drag from the wind. In theory it was a clever idea. Then he proceeded to spray paint the entire thing silver. To make it look more like a UHaul? Protection from the elements? He might have just painted an orange line across it while he was at it. So two nights before we were supposed to embark on our journey, Mike loaded our stuff into the trailer – two by two (we didn’t actually have two of everything) and took the trailer out for a test drive. The problem was this….the trailer’s tires were of the size that would haul a skidoo, not all of our crap. Mike came in to bed, sleeping bags on the floor at this point, and was quite stressed. It’s too heavy, he said. Just too heavy. The tires can’t take it.
We decided to unload some of the heavier items the next day, package them up and send them home by train (I’m wondering why we didn’t just sent it all home by train). That evening, we waved good-bye to our home in Scarborough and drove to Mississauga where we would spend the night at my sister’s. I believe we had someone follow us on the 401 and they reported, at the other end, that our tiny little skidoo tires were slanting outwards all the way. But it was too late, we’d spend all our money and all we had was enough for the gas to Calgary and a couple of stop overs on the way so we had to go through with it. We parked at my sisters and slept and subconsciously prayed all through that pouring, rainy night. We got up in the morning, said our goodbyes and off we went.
We made it about twenty miles out of Mississauga when -kaboom – the tires exploded and the trailer dropped to the pavement. It wasn’t the tornado of clothes and bedding that I had imagined it being when I had pondered this in my mind for many weeks. Mike managed to pull the car and trailer over to the side of the highway and we shut the car off. Andrew (our then two year old) leaned forward and asked “What’s everybody crying about?”.
What were we going to do now? Mike spotted a farm house in the distance and decided to walk over to get help (we didn’t have cell phones back then). Before long a tow truck appeared to tow us to the closest gas station in a rinky dink little town, where Andrew and I spend the afternoon, drinking chocolate milk, until temporary tires were put on the trailer and we inched our way back to Mississauga. We were instructed to go no further than Mississauga. By the time we arrived back at my sisters everyone was just getting home from work and wondering what we were doing there. So we explained our plight and brainstormed for solutions.
Mike had remembered a friend from our church had wanted to buy this skidoo trailer (when it was still a skidoo trailer) because he wanted it for, of all things, his skidoo. So Mike called him up and explained situation and lo and behold, the guy still wanted it. So we unloaded it and he came by and got it and paid us for it. Guess what we did next? We rented a UHaul. We like to do things the hard way. We like to make memories. We could only afford the smaller UHaul so we still had to unload some more things at my sisters. We left them with a gas BBQ and some small furniture and I can’t remember what else and loaded up the UHaul. Side note: all the rain the first night leaked into the trailer and into our boxes and caused all the colors on many of our clothes to run onto others. Fun times. As you can imagine, I wasn’t amused.
Long story even longer, we did finally make our way back to Calgary in one piece after that. God has a sense of humor or maybe it was just coincidence but when we were in Kelowna that summer visiting Mike’s parents, we passed a motor-home sitting on the side of the road and the contents of that motor-home were strewn all over the highway and ditches. I know it wasn’t appropriate but Mike and I just howled (when we should have been feeling their pain.) That could have been us. That was the exact picture I had in my mind when I contemplated our tires blowing up.
I have many more similar stories of our life together and our ‘memories’ (think Eugene Levy’s voice in the Father of the Bride II). Each experience seemed like the end of the world, at the time, but here we are twenty nine years later, surviving and thriving and doing OK. God has been faithful and He has made us resilient and we have learned many lessons through the school of hard knocks. There have been mountain top experiences but most of our lives have been lived in the valley’s (or wandering around in the desert for 40 years) and that doesn’t really seem to be changing. We are in the valley at the moment, looking forward to our next mountain top experience, but we are slugging it through with the rest of you. Each of these experiences, changes us. For the better I hope. Makes us stronger. Makes us wiser. Imprints memories in our hearts. And when people say to you, in a few years, you will laugh about this, they are right. Its only ‘not funny’ in the moment, but truly it was hilarious.
The Red Plaid Apron 