Lucky 7??

So yesterday's date was 7/7/07. As such, many were saying it could be called the luckiest day of the year.

So which part of our lucky day would you like to hear about first? The part where our car broke down on the freeway at 6:30 am, or the part when Cory got two flat tires on his bike ride, lost cell coverage, and after finally getting a hold of me he sat down to wait and stepped in dog poo? OR, the part where the tow truck company we hired to remove our abandoned vehicle called when they were 1/2 an hour late to apologize that their truck had broken down on the way to our rescue? The irony. Not to worry, he gave us the phone number of another tow company. I called him but he too apologized, explaining that his flatbed truckdriver had died of a heart attack a few days prior and he had not hired another driver yet. This was starting to get crazy, and it didn't escape my attention that somebody's life was far worse than mine right now. Still, I had a stranded car that needed to find its way to the dealership before day's end. I was referred three more times before we found someone who could extract our car from the Krispy Kreme/Del Taco parking lot where Cory had waited for three hours. As a result, we had to cancel some dinner plans with co-workers and reschedule our babysitter for later that night, hoping for eventual reprieve.

Dinner was great, and we decided that our stroke of bad luck was over for the day. We came home and asked our babysitter for the report. "The kids were good, but...ummm...there was this really loud sound that came from the garage...I'm not sure what happened, it just came out of nowhere. There's something that fell on the garage floor...." We went to scope it out and sure enough, we discovered parts on the floor indicating a broken garage door.
On one side.
The side that had our one working car in it.
And we would have moved it to the other side, but we didn't have the opener for that one because it was in the other car. You know, the one that was towed to the shop? Yeah, that one. Recognizing that we still needed to return our babysitter to her rightful family, Cory and I exerted a little force and opened it manually. The sitter and I got in the car, started it up, and began to exit. As I inched my way out I looked back, and then front, back and front again, only this time as I looked forward I saw Cory lurch in a panic, trying to stop the garage door that was suddenly plummeting and heading for the top of our vehicle. I slammed on the accelerator, stared ahead, and watched as the weight of the garage door missed the hood of our car by approximately two inches. I sat there in stunned silence until Cory appeared out of the other side of the garage.

As soon as we saw each other and noted the circumstances we just endured and the disaster we just narrowly escaped, we started to laugh. All the events of this day, mostly endured by Cory, came boiling to the surface and the laughter came so hard that soon I could hardly breathe. The babysitter giggled nervously along; this poor 15-year-old girl had come to our house for the very first time, and I fear she might never return.

A lucky day? The car broke down, but not too far from home. Cory's tires blew out on his bike...TWICE...but he was going uphill. Fast? Downhill? That would have been bad. His cell phone worked eventually, and after stepping in the poo he still had to wait 45 minutes for me to get to him so he had plenty of time to clean it off. He's not the one who died of a heart attack, and in the end we didn't actually crush our car with the plummeting garage door. 7/7/07. Could have been worse.