Taxicab Depressions

In the immortal words of Ron White, “I told you that last story to tell you this one…”

My rather churchy and God-fearing wife sees the hand of the Lord in the most mundane of everyday events, even something like having dollar-off coupons on the very day that Publix has a two-for-one sale on three pound rump roasts. “Everything happens according to his plan,” she will tell you. Personally, I don’t believe God has a hand in my wife’s grocery shopping or household chores, but whatever… I don’t argue, but I still give thanks for such events, just the same.

So I’m sitting in the parking lot of a gas station after bar close, shooting the shit with two other drivers, Buck and Todd. I tell them about the puppy… pretty much what I posted previously. But one thing I left out of that story is that on the third or fourth day of having the puppy in the house, my very indignant wife called me at work to tell me that MY dog had pissed on the carpet. I was a little irked because I was kinda busy, we were still in the process of trying to find Roadkill’s owner, and I never got this kind of call on any of the other four dogs we have had in the house at any given moment in the years since I met my babe.

I said, “Hunnee, why are you calling me to bitch about a puppy? She’s A PUPPY, and puppies tend to do that… and it isn’t MY dog. I think its YOUR MOM’s dog… she saw it first, and had she kept her yap closed, we never would have seen this dog, unless she was dead in the gutter on our street. I was the third person to see her, not the first, and not the second… I say we name her your Mom’s name… she’ll love that…”

< exasperated exhalation of breath on the other end of the phone >

I said, “Hey, don’t get pissed at me because God sent you a puppy…”

If you touch the right nerve, my hunnee instantly transforms into a southern black Baptist woman, raising her voice, wagging her finger, and bobbing her head from side to side, a’ la Aretha Franklin in The Blues Brothers:

She says, “Oh, don’t you go there… don’t you presume to tell me about God’s plans, you ho-wrangler…”

I laughed and said, “Hey… you can’t have it both ways… rump roasts and puppies… is this God’s plan or not…? What will you say if she barks and wakes everybody up because the house is on fire, or if she runs to get help when the baby falls down an abandoned well, like Lassie…?”

< more exasperated exhalations of breath on the other end of the phone >

Anyway, I was wrapping this story up while I popped my trunk and got out my vacuum. I carry a Black and Decker Car-Vac to sweep up the car… it plugs into the cigarette lighter and does a tremendous job, as well as saving me a buck a day to vacuum the car, and yeah, a couple hundred bucks a year means something to a guy with a baby. Buck says, “Man, I gotta get one of those…”

And I tell him, “Ya know how I got this? I was running some errands on my day off, and I was driving past that giant Goodwill store on Main Street. Something in my head told me to stop and go in there. So I went in, found two great shirts for five bucks each, and as I walked past the electronics aisle, I saw this sitting there next to the toasters and Mister Coffee’s… priced less than five bucks. It paid for itself in a week, and I’m reaping the benefits every night since. I showed it to my wife when I got it, and I told her how something inside me told me to stop at a place I never intended to go, and I found such a great buy. And my wife told me that the Lord had steered me into that Goodwill store…”

And Todd says, “Wait a minute… God sent you a vacuum, but he didn’t send your wife a puppy…?”

Exactly, Todd…