The intrigue has me overwhelmed now, and I decide I must find out the answer. There’s a gas station about two minutes and twelve seconds from my house, so it’s a quick round trip I can make. If I weren’t convinced that there’s a good explanation why nobody is around, I wouldn’t make the trip. I would save every last ounce of gas I have.
I pull out of the garage, not even bothering to pull the garage door down. On a normal day and a normal situation, I’m very cautious about leaving the garage door up. My car has a long history of being broken into. I join the long list of people who have had their CD players stolen. Another time, I had my car broken into for nothing more than the change that was visible in the cup holder. This thief’s $2.27 robbery cost me a $500 out-of-pocket deductible to fix the car lock they ripped open. It would have offended me less if they had stolen something valuable.
There isn’t much to steal in my garage anyway. It’s big enough to fit my and Abby’s car and that’s about it. I do have a ladder, an edge trimmer, and a snow blower but I wouldn’t lose a minute of sleep if those were stolen. I suppose it’s the principle behind getting robbed that makes me want to prevent it by any means necessary. I rarely get upset but thieves seem to anger me more than anything. Abby feels the same way. If we had it our way, anyone who was convicted of stealing on more than one occasion would be sentenced to getting his or her hands chopped off. On the first offense we’d settle for a finger or two.
Pulling out of the driveway with the garage door still up speaks volumes to my confidence that nobody is around. As I make my way to the gas station, I’m already starting to regret my decision, even though it’s only a five-minute trip. I push down hard on the accelerator and listen to the roar of my Chevy Cavalier’s little four-cylinder engine. With nobody around, this is the first time I’ve felt the urge to be disdainful toward the law. I speed through the first stop sign and feel a rush of excitement. I can do anything I want now and nobody will know or care. I make my way to the gas station in record time — twenty seconds faster than normal. I pull into the first available spot and look out my window with high anticipation. My fate and my next course of action depend heavily on what I’m about to witness. What I see is my worst fear; the display is empty. There’s no power.
Still, I get out of my car, twist off my fuel cap and grab the gas hose. A couple drips of gas fall off the nozzle as I put it into my tank. I push up on the lever but I can tell nothing is coming out. I immediately look around as if to find some solution to this problem. Is there somewhere I can go where I can manually pump the gas? Nothing I see gives me that impression; I’m completely out of luck. Wherever I’m going to go, it better be close and I better have a good reason for going because now I only have about 130 miles of total driving left with this car. I know this, not because my car has any of those fancy mileage-prediction features but because I’ve driven my car for 150,000 miles now and I know almost down to the exact mile how far it will go with this amount of gas left. You start to pay attention to these things after you run out of gas four times in a span of two years. It’s a dumb accomplishment that should also be worthy of getting your hands (or your head) chopped off.
What should I do now? In the worst case scenario, I can try to break into people’s garages and see if they have a gas tank I can “borrow.” I’m nowhere near that point of desperation yet though.
Seeing that there’s no hope at the gas station and I have no further ideas left to explore here, I get back in my car. I take one last look at the gas station’s mini-mart thinking about what I could do if I somehow broke into the store. Would I be able to turn on the pumps then? I realize there’s nothing I could do. There’s no electricity and no key to some magical gas door.
I think about other places I could get gas. Growing up I worked at a golf course. Those carts used gas. I know because part of my job was to fill them up every couple of weeks. It’s a great idea but the course where I worked is two hours away.
I decide to file that away into the “try later” category if things get desperate. I’ll go to the nearest golf course and attempt to steal gas from the pumps. There are four golf courses within ten miles of my house, two of which I know use gas carts.
I pull out of the gas station and decide there’s nothing further I want to explore for now. I’ve learned now that gas is at a premium so I don’t want to waste any more. On my quick commute home, a realization occurs to me… silence. I normally like to listen to the radio on the way to work because driving in silence makes me go crazy.
I reach down and turn the radio on, flipping through stations but nothing comes up. No white noise, no music cutting in and out, just silence. This seems more odd than usual to me. I switch from FM to AM stations and get similar results. I don’t know exactly how far radio stations can travel, but I know when I make my way to my parents’ house, I get my favorite station for about an hour and fifteen minutes of the ride, so I know radio stations can carry at least that far. If I’m getting silence from every station, does that mean that everywhere within a ninety-mile radius of me has no power? If it does, that seems like pretty depressing news. I suppose it’s possible though that people have power and it’s just the radio stations that are down. I consider my theory inconclusive upon further research.
When I pull into the garage and go to the door, my thoughts are being pulled in all sorts of directions. I know this because I reach up and again push the garage door opener to close the door. As I go over and pull it down manually, I take a moment to appreciate something as simple as a garage door opener. It’s a little thing like this that I take for granted every day. This tiny little piece of plastic with a little electronic gizmo inside saves me and millions of other people a lot of time and energy each day. I’ve never appreciated it until now.
This gets me thinking about Abby. I’m not sure where she is, but when I see her I plan on giving her a huge hug and kiss and telling her how much I love her. I certainly take for granted how much she means to me. I’m always so caught up in work and other things that I don’t think often enough about how lucky I am to have her. The saying that your wife is your “better half” certainly applies to me ten-fold.
When I enter the house, I shout out a weak “Hon, you there?” but not one ounce of me expects a reply. I reach over to look at the digital clock by our TV and realize it’s electrically powered. Our house doesn’t have any wall clocks in it, which never struck me as odd until now. Either wall clocks are an “old people thing” or we are just not with the times.
Seeing that all the clocks we do have are electric-powered digital clocks, the only way I’ll be able to find out the time is by grabbing my watch. My parents bought me a nice expensive watch as a graduation gift. My father told me that since I would soon be in the business world, checking the time would be very important and that a watch would be essential. The reality, though, is I haven’t brought that watch into work for one day. It’s not that I don’t like the watch — it’s very nice. It’s just one more thing I would have to remember to do in the morning so I don’t bother. At work my computer has a little clock in the bottom-right corner. Ironically though, all our office rooms don’t have wall clocks. I think they have it that way so they won’t realize how much time they waste in there. This seems to work because our meetings usually conclude with one of the bosses looking down at their watch and saying, “Oh, look at the time! I don’t think I have anything further.”