Another lazy morning at the auto repair shop

Let me share with you just how much I love spending all day at a mechanic’s garage waiting for my car to be fixed:

To begin with, you might think I’d rather spend the early morning hours gathering up my fishing gear and then heading to the nearest bait shop to pick up a container of the plumpest worms a fish could ever hope to dine upon, but you’d be flatly wrong. I much prefer starting up my car and having the engine fight back as if it were a monster alligator gar intent on devouring my left leg, right up to the hip joint. And those kind of fights – man vs car/gar – are the legends stories are made of.

Sure, I could be puttering around Lake Bob Sandlin in a small flat-bottom fishing boat with a thermos filled with hot coffee, an ice chest close at hand, and a nice breeze to keep away the mosquitoes. But do you know what I’d miss? My sweaty palms holding a death grip on the steering wheel of my sputtering car, with me hoping beyond hope that it will make it to the mechanic’s garage before it passes out from heat exhaustion and the angels usher it along to that big auto junkyard in the sky.

Oh, the sounds of fish jumping for their morning flies, seeing the shy beaver as it makes its way along the shoreline, the turtles climbing up on exposed logs waiting for the sun to rise, or the random crane floating down to a perfect three-point landing can’t compare with the sounds of a perfectly-thorough mechanic pronouncing the much-needed repair for my pert near terminal car 

will cost much more than I have in my checking account.

The repair job will take four hours? Shoot, that’s nothing like having to sit on the lake, willing for something fishy to swim along and take notice of a juicy worm dangling below a bobber while I wait, feasting on a turkey sandwich I made just this morning, and washing it down with something cool to drink. What’s for desert? A piece of homemade apple pie my loving wife baked for me the night before.

“I’m sorry Mr. Farr, but we’re going to have to order the parts we need. It will only take a few more hours. Do you want to wait?” is heaven to my ears compared to turning off the boat’s engine and listening to silence; letting the wind and current take me where it may; and leaning back to peek up at the blue sky and wonder if those passing clouds look more like a family of monarch butterflies looking for a luscious patch of milkweed to snack on, or maybe a family of dragons looking for a luscious mountain village to sack.

And I know I snore. My wife knows it, too. But who would ever complain about it out on the lake? Certainly not the fish. I could float around for hours, oblivious of the world and all its troubles. My boat might even ground itself under a shade tree, giving me hours of peaceful, undisturbed slumber without being punched in the eye and told to roll over. 

But none of that malarkey at a mechanic’s shop. A good mechanic knows how to stop that “sawing of logs” with a sharp jab of the elbow, followed by a handwritten bill that doesn’t quite explain why the repair job now costs 20 percent more than previously stated.

“I might’ve bought a new boat for that amount,” I say, wiping the sleep out of my eyes. The mechanic swipes my debit card and replies, “Lucky for you, now you don’t have to. Sign here, please.”