On a cool, Carolina winter night I sat in the driver seat of an old, three cylinder, Geo Metro.
I had just wrecked it the month before by driving it backwards into a ditch. It still ran but it wasn’t going to win any beauty contests, as if it would have before. The car was just sitting in the front yard of my parents’ house waiting for someone to take it off of my hands.
Needless to say, this was a particularly bad day and the night wasn’t getting much better. So, I went outside to sit in the car. I wanted to be alone so that I could think. Actually I really wanted to pity myself without being seen.
Who could blame me though? If it was not bad enough that I merely owned a Geo Metro, I now owned a busted Geo Metro. And sadly enough I had been in two other accidents in the previous year. I was the proud owner of a vehicular bulls-eye.
My life wasn’t easy before all of my car problems, so I just sat there thinking about how much of a loser I was. I had no idea how to dig myself out of the hole that I was in.
I thought that I would always be poor and living with my parents. I thought I would never have a good job, never have a girlfriend, and never get out of Nowhere, North Carolina.
My life sucked!
Eventually I stopped thinking and just stared loathingly into the crisp, starry, night sky hoping that an answer would fall into my lap through the sun roof or that a meteor would fall from that very sky and crush me and the remnants of my stupid car.
It is now ten years later and the memory of that night just popped back into my head. I don’t know why. That night did not provide any life altering insights or events that made me an infinitely stronger and better person.
I do know this though; it is midnight and I am lying in bed next to my beautiful sleeping wife, I have a college degree I never thought I’d get, and I live and work in Smalltown, Pennsylvania.
I guess my life isn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be all those years ago sitting in my broken down car.
One thing is certain, my life can’t be any worse than the guy who bought that Geo Metro off of me.