When I was still in college, my sister and I were driving her 1968 VW Convertible Beetle from Tallahassee to Ft. Lauderdale for Christmas break.
Believe it or not, it gets pretty cold in Florida in the winter, and my sister’s car didn’t have a heater. So we were dressed in several layers of warm clothing. I have a very vivid memory of my sister wearing a bulky sweatshirt, and a black-and-white checkered bubble skirt over her thick sweatpants. I was sporting a beige-and-white prairie skirt over three pairs of leggings, and a navy blue pullover hoodie.
We looked like we were sporting outfits straight out of the Raggedy Anne Winter Collection.
It was something like an 11-hour drive, but my sister and I were ready; we had a few
There was no stopping us!
The trip was going great until we got onto the Florida Turnpike. That was when the little Easter-egg-yellow convertible started to cough and sputter. The tiny car finally choked to death on the side of the road, leaving us stranded and looking for help from a passing motorist. With hindsight, I think the clothes we were wearing worked against our rescue efforts that day. Between my thick ankles, and my sister’s not-so-slimming bubble skirt, we were looking like a couple of truly pathetic hippy-chicks.
But before long, a huge tractor-trailer hauling grapefruits eased up and then glided to a stop a few hundred yards ahead of us. A small driver climbed out of his rig and came toward us. My sister and I stiffened a bit as he approached the car, but when he smiled at us, his toothless grin made him seem harmless, and frankly, kind of endearing.
The driver opened up the engine lid in the back of the car, leaned down, and gave it a thorough look. When he pulled himself upright, he said,
“Looks like you’ve got bapor lock.”
(Remember, we were sharp college girls, so we figured out what he meant. The car had
The driver went on to explain that our exhaust manifold was clogged, and it was truly a simple fix. All we had to do was take a grapefruit, cut it in half, and place the two halves on top of the exhaust manifold. The acid from the grapefruit would dissolve the “bapor,” and the car would be back to functioning in no time. After he told us this, he ran back to his rig and climbed up the side of the trailer to grab a couple of grapefruits for us.
By the time he returned, I was already inspecting our engine, looking for a label or some other indicator to point to the exhaust manifold, while my sister was looking for a screwdriver in a small tool kit my dad tucked under the front seat of her car. Her thought was to take off the license plate so we could use it as a makeshift knife to cut the grapefruit in half.
But as soon as the grapefruit hauling driver and his rig merged into the flow of traffic, my sister suddenly stopped. She was holding the two grapefruits in her hands, and she was just looking at me with a furrowed brow. Then she said:
“Sonja. You can’t fix a car with a grapefruit.”
I remember feeling my heart sink when she made this very obvious declaration. Of course you can’t.
I’m not stupid. But my willingness and desire to believe in a simple answer to a complicated problem was very strong. And, I do think that I have a large capacity for hoping that tricky problems can have a simple solution. I guess I want to believe that I can outwit life’s biggest challenges with
But having a strong will and a deep pool of hope inside of me has served me well in the past. Sometimes the most unconventional idea has turned out to be my saving grace in a pinch. I’m a true believer, and I never want to stop believing in miracles. Believing in the impossible is part of what makes me who I am.
However…
“The Bapor Lock Incident of 1991” is probably the first time I had to fully check my belief in man-made miracles against my reality.
