My car broke down on the first day of my vacation.
Perfect.
Seriously. It was perfect.
We spent a lazy morning reading in the sun, then decided to head toward the water.
We weren't very far from home (key phrase: "not very far from home") when the car just stopped running. We called the tow truck, the driver took me home, I picked up the other car, grabbed the beach stuff out of my car at the mechanic's and we continued on our way.
Perfect.
The next day we left at the crack of dawn for Stratford, Ontario, to see some plays. We stopped at a Tim Horton's shortly after we got into Canada and grabbed a quick lunch, one eye on the time because we had a 2 p.m. play.
Later, when we pulled off the freeway at the exit toward Stratford, I asked my husband to grab something out of my purse.
No purse.
I admit to pushing the speed limit as we backtracked 30k to Tim Horton's. I was worried about missing the play (the tickets were in my purse, along with just about everything else important). My husband was worried the purse wouldn't be there.
"You mean stolen?" I asked. "This is Canada."
The purse was on Tim Horton's back counter. I grabbed it, hollered my thanks and dashed again. We made it to Stratford, found a (free) place to park and got to the theater with 10 minutes to spare.
Perfect.
The rest of the week continued the same way -- events that could have been tragic ended up ... perfect. We went to a Tigers game in 95-degree heat that ended up being a blast when we got the hang of dousing each other with water. (It helped that it was an exciting game that the Tigers won, of course.)
We dodged a thunderstorm by getting off the People Mover a stop early and ducking into the pastry shop in Greektown. When we walked out, everything was freshly watered -- except us.
I know people who might have taken a different tack on the whole vacation. A broken car, a forgotten purse, a muggy day at the ballpark followed by a giant thunderstorm would have spelled disaster and given them something to complain about for months.
We saw our glass half-full, actually overflowing, and kept commenting about our remarkable good luck, the serendipity of everything, our blessed lives.
It wasn't even a case of making lemonade from lemons, because we never saw anything that happened to us as lemon-y. The Tim Horton's will forever be a landmark to us, the cornfield where the car broke down already has mythic status. These are the things that make memories, we said.
And they're perfect.
Jodee Taylor can be reached at jtaylor@record-eagle.com.
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