Rule for the road #2 says that in order to get somewhere, you have to be able to start the car. That means, of course, that you already have the keys. Sometimes that is difficult for Mommy to keep both of these rules straight.
Once she returned to the parking lot after work to find that she did not have the keys to the car. Before going back to the office, she looked inside. Sure enough, there were the keys. At least with this car, she knew how to break in and get the keys. In a little while, she was inside, but the car would not start (rule #2). It was now pretty late, and there were not very many people around. Mommy went to the garage attendant and asked if he knew someone who could give her a jump.
"Are you driving that brown van on the top level?" he asked.
"Yeah!" Mommy was surprised that he knew which car she drove.
"Well, you're out of gas," he said.
"How's that?" she asked. How could he know she was out of gas? Besides, the car had not been on empty when she parked it.
He did know. He explained, "Because you left the keys in the ignition with the car running and the door locked. We tried to get in but could not. The car finally ran out of gas in the middle of the afternoon."
Oops! He probably thought that Mommy was crazy. Maybe he was right.
Conclusion: If you want to go somewhere, you have to be able to start the car.
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This story is excerpted from a collection of vignettes that I helped Doah, my severely mentally challenged youngest son, to write and publish several years ago (copyright 2003). It was my attempt to help him understand literacy and the purpose of writing and reading.
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About Me
- Elizabeth Mahlou
- I am the mother of 4 birth children (plus 3 others who lived with us) and grandmother of 2, all of them exceptional children. Married for 42 years, I grew up in Maine, live in California, and work in many places in education, linguistics, and program management. In my spare time, I rescue and tame feral cats and have the scars to prove it. A long-time ignorantly blissful atheist converted by a theophanic experience to Catholicism, I am now a joyful catechist. Oh, I also authored a dozen books, two under my pen name of Mahlou (Blest Atheist and A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God).
Recommended Reading List
Because I am blog inept, I don't quite know how to get a reading list to stay at the end of the page and not disappear from sight. Therefore, I entered it as my first post. I suppose that is not all that bad because readers started commenting about the books, even suggesting additional readings. So, you can participate with others in my reading list by clicking here.I do post additional books as I read them and find them to be meaningful to me, and therefore, hopefully, meaningful to you. One advantage of all the plane traveling I do is that I acquire reading time that I might not otherwise take.
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