Tire Center Christmas (Part 1)
A Writer waited in a corporate tire center for a warranty service he didn't comprehend. He knew nothing of tires. In fact, he'd never changed a tire in his life.
As he waited, he polished an essay for a slick Zen magazine about noble, silent caring for the world. In his case, caring meant accommodating honeybees building a hive in a wheel well of a vintage Airstream that served as his irony-free writing studio. The essay's payoff was the delicious ending where he harvested the honey, slathered it on butter he churned himself, and the biscuits made from scratch. Anyone could do it. They just had to notice, care and act. Action.
The Writer didn't churn butter. He made biscuits from a box. He would never harvest the Airstream honey nor any honey. It didn't matter. The essay would move hearts and minds, serve the greater good, the larger cause. He, along with many other writers, felt perfectly comfortable making things up, because, well, most writers practice empathy on the page and never in real life. It's really easy that way.
It was the early afternoon of December 24th in Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast. Outside the tire center, a near freezing rain fell. If the temperature dropped another degree, everybody's Christmas would be shot to icy hell. They'd have to spend the holiday alone or seek out strangers within sliding distance and break figgy pudding with them.
He sat next to a big window overlooking the parking lot. Needles of rain battered the glass. The lot was full. The center was packed. Twas the season for new tires, tire repair, tire rotations, studded tires. Young men in coverall uniforms wearing Santa hats and reindeer horns ran around, rolling tires, checking with customers, trying to expedite service and get people moving on their merry way. It was all sort of a festive madhouse, but those in the waiting room were oblivious because everyone, including small children, fiddled on their devices. Coloring was dead. No talking. No eye contact. No reading magazines. No one even watched Fox News blasting out commentary defending the President's mocking of a quadriplegic liberal reporter falling out of her wheelchair at a rally because one of the President's fanatics tipped it over. It was really funny. She'd shit herself, too.
A fake Christmas tree, fresh cedar bows and a myrtlewood Nativity scene atop a straw-filled monster truck tire comprised the holiday decorations. Free coffee simmered on a warmer but nobody cared because everyone sipped sweet $9 holiday espresso concoctions and thought they tasted swell. Drip coffee was dead.
The essay was sizzling. Words like dappled and glinted flowed effortlessly from tapping his fancy tablet. He had no problem tuning out the chaos of the tire center because he was listening to classic country Christmas music on headphones. He had no idea what was happening around him. He knew everything the essay needed to sing, to soar, and earn him a tidy three grand and a free week-long retreat at a Buddhist compound in the Wallowa Mountains. He wasn't even a Buddhist! During the retreat, he'd write an essay about gathering wild lavender in a nearby Native American cemetery and making peasant lemonade from it. He'd sell that essay lickety-split to a glossy magazine extolling the gritty virtues of peasant life.
Oh what a Christmas Eve it was going to be in Lincoln City! His yoga instructor girlfriend was driving over the hills and through the woods from Portland for a tasteful bacchanal, and his fans had bought thousands of his books, $19.99 softcover tomes exuding the benefits of practicing empathy. The books were purchased as gifts to instill caring. No one would read them, of course, lol. But they would Instagram the holy living shit out of the book's cover and let the world know they were kicking ass making the world a better place. Instagram makes it so easy, so cool.
A commotion shook the waiting room. One of the men rolling a tire slipped on the floor and sent it crashing into the Nativity scene. Figurines zinged everywhere, smashing into metal rims and windows. The Three Wise Men splintered. The Virgin Mary pulverized. Baby Jesus was dead.
The Writer looked up. He slipped off his headphones. What the hell is going on? I'm trying to write about the world but the world is interrupting me goddammit!
He saw a young woman wearing threadbare white yoga pants and a black hoodie with the hood pulled over her head as she slumped against the counter. The counter seemed to be holding her up. Two small girls wearing furry coats over cartoon-character pajamas rolled around on the floor behind her.
The woman, stick thin, medium height, was talking to a serious man behind the counter. The man was shaking his head, and at some point the woman removed her hood and Rapunzel-like hair, blazing red, fell down past her waist. As she talked, she reached around and twisted her hair in a ponytail.
To the Writer's left a cleanup crew was sweeping up the Nativity scene and readying it for the garbage.
The Writer kept watching the conversation but still hadn't removed his headphones. The counter man shook his head more vigorously, his brow tightened, and the woman turned sharply to her children and said something stern to them. The Writer saw the woman's face: narrow, hollow, angry, scarred, spent.
She snapped back to the counter man and released the ponytail. Counter man eased away and she was alone. She stood there for a few seconds then slid down to the floor. Her children crawled over to her and she embraced them. She was sobbing, but not making a sound.
The Writer set down his tablet. He removed his headphones. He scanned the waiting room. No one was looking at the woman. He was. He was staring at a pile of a family huddled together on the floor of a corporate tire center on Christmas Eve.
A strange clicking noise arrested the Writer's attention. He turned around and could see rain hitting the windows and freezing on impact. The temperature had dropped that one degree. In 90 minutes, virtually no one would be driving the streets of Lincoln City except idiots and emergency service vehicles.
The Writer glanced at the clock. Almost 2 p.m. He checked to see if his vehicle had been moved from the parking lot into one of the service bays. It had not. It didn't matter. He could slip and slide home. He only lived a few blocks from the center, in a cozy cottage. Both the cottage and the Airstream afforded magnificent views of the ocean and the Writer spent mornings and evenings watching the waves with his coffee or wine. If the literary mood struck him, and it usually did, he listed all the metaphors the ocean provided his writing. New ones arrived every morning on the incoming tide. They sold like hotcakes to the Druid and Sufi magazines.
He stood up to leave. Warranty service could wait a few days. He gathered up his things and headed for the door. The Writer would have to pass mere inches from the the pile to leave. He checked the waiting room. A stacked fox on Fox News was outfoxing decent Americans to hate other human beings.
The Writer began walking toward the pile. The pile didn't look up. They usually don't. There was no metaphor in the pile. It was a pile of an Oregon family. An Oregon family teetered in a crisis the Writer couldn't possibly fathom, but he knew how to employ the precious verb teeter.
But as a writer he was supposed to try and understand the pile. A writer can't begin to try unless he or she engages with the world, and not just with sentences. Curiosity. Conversation. Move. Movement. Write it up later or not. Do it to give a shit, not for the story.
Doesn't a human pile right in front of you demand action? At the very least, curiosity? Who gives a damn whether you're a writer or not? Act. It's Christmas Eve for chrissakes! Act like it's Christmas Eve every day of the year! If we all did that, it might be Christmas year round and people wouldn't want to kill themselves at Christmas.
Dickens had his ghosts. Saul had his shining light on the road to Damascus. The Grinch heard Whoville sing. One Oregon writer got his epiphany when his wife called him out for being rude to a checker in a grocery store. The checker was being a decent human being and talking to an elderly woman, making her day, and therefore holding up the line. That irritated the writer. His wife kicked his heart's ass and he never again acted rude to a checker for being a decent human being.
No outside intervention was coming to the Writer, supernatural or otherwise. He would have to discover it within. If it wasn't there, he would have to make it up from scratch, with the ingredients at hand, with no recipe to guide him. What were those ingredients at hand?