Chevy Impalas and Cherry Pies

With Herculean strength and the balance of a Rockefeller checkbook I carried a stack of textbooks, notebooks, a 4-valve piston King tuba, and my marching band uniform, and with a combination of a huff, a puff, and two grunts ... STEP ... I had achieved the first step home.

By my calculations, I had only 2639 steps remaining and therefore at that pace I should be able to make it home within, oh, about 400 hours. That is, if a glacier didn't come storming through town due to the next ice age or I didn't get trampled under by a herd of snails rushing to the creek.
With another huff, puff, and two grunts ... STEP ... I was on step two! Only 2638 steps left, but who was counting?

My arms began aching and I started wondering if there were labor unions for students and shouldn't there be laws against this sort of thing and whose fault was it anyway, the teachers', my parents', or my own?

Zoom! A car passed me, going down Fifteenth Street in Onawa in a hurry. Pretty soon another zoom followed. I had little hope that any of the upper classmen who had cars would stop to offer me a ride home, but still, every time I heard a car approaching I put on an extra grimace and took another step forward, making sure any passers-by would see my plight, the struggles of the academic tuba player.

Huff, puff, grunt grunt ... STEP ... I was making progress.

Zoom! Another car passed me. Zoom zoom. Two more cars passed me.

I heard another car approaching. This car didn't zoom though. It slowed down. I looked over to the street and saw my buddy Jim with his window down.

"Hey Joel," he called out.

"Hey ... Huff ... Puff ... Grunt Grunt," I called out.

"You got quite a load there," Jim commented.

"Yep ... Huff ... Puff ... Grunt Grunt," I replied.

"Don't you wish you played the flute?" Jim laughed.

Before I could respond, he shouted, "See ya tomorrow," and drove off.

Huff ... Puff ... Grunt Grunt ... STEP ... another one.

This went on interminably. Soon I was near my sister's friend Mary's house. I thought about stopping there to see if I could have dinner and stay overnight before resuming my walk home.

At about that moment, I heard a car pull up to the side of the rode. "Need a ride?" I heard a voice call out.

"Sure Mom, that would be great," I replied.

With a few more huffs, puffs, and grunt grunts, I made it over to the car, a '75 metallic green Chevy Impala station wagon, the last of the big wagons (it officially seated eight but it had room for about forty). I put everything in the back, and then I walked around to the passenger side and hopped in the front seat.

"Thanks Mom for the ride. That stuff was getting heavy."

"Oh no problem, Son. You had quite a load there."

"Yeah, I was going to tell you that they got the tuba fixed and that I'd be bringing it home, but I forgot."

"How'd your test go?" Mom inquired. She always did a great job of keeping up with our schoolwork. I guess that came naturally for her, since she had been a teacher up until when I was born.

"Oh it went fine. I got mixed up on the lie-lay-laid thing again."

"Hens lay, people lie," Mom reminded me.

"So the prayer 'Now I lay me down to sleep' is really about chickens?"

"Well no, it's really a little more complex than that."

"That's what I was afraid of. Oh, I have another question. I took the test on Tale of Two Cities today, and I got stuck for a while on the first question."

"What was the first question?"

"What were the two cities?"

"You didn't know that? But you read the book."

"I loved that book!"

"But you didn't know the two cities in Tale of Two Cities?"

"Well no ... did Dickens really specify what they were?"

"How about London and Paris?!"

"Oh ... oh yeah, well that makes sense. I guess I was kind of distracted though."

"Distracted, how?"

"Leonard got sick during the test. He covered his mouth with his hands and ran toward he door, but, well, he didn't make it. He lost it all right there in the doorway."

"Oh no. That's too bad."

"Oh that's not the best part. George had to go to the bathroom, but Leonard's ... uh ... well the doorway was blocked. George decided to try jumping over it. He took a running leap and ... almost made it. He slipped and landed on his back."

"Oh my!"

"So I was kind of distracted. London and Paris, huh, who would have figured?"

At that point we were about a block from home.

"So where have you been?" I asked Mom.

"Oh, I went to the church bake sale."

"Oh cool. Did you find anything good there."

"Well, I bought that cherry pie for dessert tonight."

I turned around and looked in the back seat.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"You ... didn't see it when you got in the car?"

"Should I have?"

I had one of those sinking feelings, kind of like when you're balance on the back two legs of a chair and there's a moment when suddenly you realize you're going to tip over but there's nothing you can do about it.

As Mom pulled into the driveway, I lifted my bottom up off the seat and ... right there, beneath where I had been sitting, was a flattened cherry pie. Not only was it flattened, but it was the flattest I had ever seen a pie. And of course the plastic wrap covering the pie couldn't contain the pie filling from leaking ... there was cherry pie filling all over.

For dessert that night I got to eat a flattened cherry pie. There wasn't a lot of filling left in the pie, and nobody else really wanted to eat the pie that I had squished.

I'm not sure what the moral is here. Look before you leap? I don't know. But when moments like this come along, you may as well accept it with humility and appreciate it with humor. I was laughing about it by the time we were ready to start dessert ...

My brother and sister, who hadn't squished any pies, didn't get any dessert. They also didn't see the humor in it that I did.