No, not about my novel with the auto mechanic who can see her guardian angel. I know you love when those guys show up, but sorry — this one’s the real deal.
My Patient Husband’s windshield wipers have been on the fritz for over a month now. They start okay but when I tell them to stop, they (like my children) ignore me. Instead they keep swishing for a few repeats before crying, “Oh, NO! What have we done?”
At which point, they halt in random places on the windshield. All the way up? Part way up? Right in your field of vision? Doesn’t matter.
The intermittent wipers no longer intermit. They just keep on going and going and going. The “one wipe at a time” bar results in something more like “eight and two-thirds swishes.”
On Friday, I had to drive the Patientmobile after a day of spitting rain, and joy of joys — the mere act of turning on the engine started the wipers. They’d been safely tucked down, but this time they ended up stopping right across my line of sight. After seven tries I finally got the wipers to stop where they didn’t impede my ability to see oncoming traffic.
That was okay until the rain came back. I thought to my guardian, “No, no — either NO rain can fall on me, or BUCKETS of rain so I can keep them on.”
I got a picture in my head of angels flying along holding an umbrella over the windshield.
I thought, “Yeah, that.”
Then it started raining buckets, so I just turned them on, and they stayed on because, well, that’s the only thing they seem to know how to do these days.
But here’s what’s cool — shortly the rain eased, and I shut off the wipers. And they swished to a stop. At the bottom of the windshield, no less.
For all the rest of the trip there, and all the way back, the wipers were fixed. Whenever I had to shut them off, or put them on the delay setting, or just push once to clear some spatter — they worked. The wipers would stop when I told them to, and only stop at the bottom and not in the middle or all the way up.
So basically, yes, my car got fixed by angels.
That’s so funny about the windshield wipers. I wonder if they’ll continue to work, or if it’s just a temporary fix. Must have been quite the relief, though!
I took the car on Saturday and they still worked then. So we’ll see.
What’s the dividing line where we go from “It was possibly just an electrical glitch and it fixed itself for a little while” to “It’s definitely fixed”? A week is too short, so if it fritzes out again by next Friday, we’ll say “clever coincidence.” But if it lasts a month? Two months?
Whereas if the angel had presented me with a bill and said “That wiper was harder to fix than we thought–” we’d know for sure. 😉 (Not only that he was a mechanic, but he was a Brooklyn mechanic.)
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