I pulled the trailer out of the garage (I had decided to do the loading in the relative warmth inside) and hooked it onto the car. I made sure the chains and wiring were connected: the day was not going to get worse, I swore.
The whole fifteen-minute trip to the transfer station, I kept checking the rear-view mirror to make sure nothing shifted. At the station, I unloaded the recyclables, then drove around to the dumping area and threw in the trash. So far, so good. I checked all the bungees, and everything seemed firmly attached. I headed off to the storage area, still planning to cartoon when I got home. (As it would turn out, there would be no cartooning till Monday.)
Ten minutes later, I was two thirds of the way there, when I looked in the rear-view and saw that some of the tire were missing! I immediately pulled over, and a man in a van pulled up behind me. "You lost two of your tires," he said. They're both over there," he said, pointing to some apartment buildings nearby. They almost hit me, but we were both lucky!" I apologized and thanked him, and went over to get the tire I could see. The other one was nowhere in sight, so I turned around to go back and try to find the two tires that were still missing--and the two crates of Christmas stuff that I thought had also fallen off. I pulled over to get the big aluminum tray we put under our Christmas tree stand in case of leaks, which was sitting in the middle of the four lane road, only slightly banged up from the fall. By now it was about 3:30 PM, so it was dark enough that some people had their lights on and others didn't. I grabbed the tray and was about to run back across the road to my car because the car that was approaching in the lane I'd have to cross was signaling that he was going to turn before he got to me. Nope! He had one light out and was using his parking lights instead of headlights, but proceeded full speed ahead in my direction. Luckily, I realized this in time and stopped to let him drive by. As I got in the car, I thought, This is another reason you should never use your parking lights as headlights! If it's dark enough to have your lights on, use your damn headlights! You're not parking when you're driving forty miles an hour, so don't use your parking lights when driving. This has been taught in driving school for at least forty years, so everyone should know it by now! But I digress.
Before I pulled out, another guy stopped and said, "I saw your other tire fall off back by CVS." I thanked him and thought, Okay, if no one stops and steals that tire, I'll just be down one tire. Which would mean in the spring, I'd still have to pay for one wheel (probably at least $150 used, if I could find one used) and two tires--you know they're going to say I should buy two matching tires, not just replace one and have the other be a year older than the new one; they wouldn't wear or ride evenly!
I found the tire where he'd said it was. I climbed the fence between the road and the parking lot where I pulled in and retrieved it, tying it and everything else down VERY securely, then drove all the way back to the transfer station, checking the sides of the road as I drove.
The gate was closed. I asked the two men there, about to close up for the night, if they'd seen a tire or plastic crate in the lot. No, they said, and no one had turned anything in. So I headed back to where I'd found the first tire, checking both sides of the road again for tires and crates--or, worse, a splash of beloved Christmas heirlooms scattered across the landscape.
I tried to remember what might have been in the missing crates. The Hallmark house ornaments that my mother had given me each Christmas, one a year, for twenty-five years? The "NOEL" ceramic candle holders that belonged to my wife's grandmother? The little clay versions of our dogs and cat (all now deceased) that I made when the kids were little for them to hang on the tree?
It then occurred to me that maybe the load had shifted forward on the trailer. It had all been on the rear half of the bed, but in my panic, I hadn't counted how many plastic crates were still on the trailer; I just saw the missing tires and assumed the two crates that had been at the back of the trailer under them were gone, too. But maybe there were still six.
This was a small consolation, although by this point I assumed that, the way things had been going, they were probably all gone. And by now it was getting late, and darker, and I needed to get to the storage area. No time to pull over and check. Depressed over the loss of whatever was lost, I pulled into the apartment complex to take one last look...and there it was on the side of one of the streets: the fourth tire! I pulled over and counted the crates: six! No Christmas items had been harmed in the making of this disaster. I scooped up the tire and rim (I would've hugged it, but someone might've seen me), tied it down with lots of extra, caaarrrefully placed bungees, and drove to the storage unit. Everything was quickly unloaded without incident. I looked for the long brush/scrapers we keep in our cars to dust off snow--they'd been missing and I thought I probably put them in storage--but by then it was too dark to see into the recesses of the stuff, so I resolved to look for the scrapers again at home.
I'd been on a diet all week, with the plan that I was allowed to go off the diet, if I so chose, on the weekend. Having lost several pounds already and feeling more like my pre-holidays self, weight-wise, I had decided earlier in the day that maybe I'd ease up a bit but not pig out over the weekend. But as I headed home with an empty trailer, a sore cheek and dusty clothes, I decided that The Diet Was Off.
We went out to dinner that night, and I had a martini; hot bread dipped in herbed olive oil; fried rice balls stuffed with sausage, cheese and other good stuff and served with a thick tomato sauce; veal with butternut squash ravioli in a cream sauce*; and a dessert of gelato with baklava crumbled into it.
And I didn't regret it at all.**
*I would usually have eaten half of the entree and taken the other half home for later...but not this time. This time I ate the whole thing.
**Except the guilt about eating veal.
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