Saturday, I didn't exactly learn any new lessons but let's say I got a few grim reminders. My tale of woe began somewhat inconsequentially last week. The weather had been cold and rainy for several days, preventing my usual three-mile walk every afternoon. On Wednesday I was substituting an hour of what I call store-walking, this time at Target. When I started my drive home, the late rush hour traffic was getting underway.
As soon as I pulled out of the parking lot onto the main drag, I got the first signal something was wrong: There was a shimmy, a thump, and a vibration in the steering like you sometimes feel when a wheel's out of balance or the front end's out of alignment. After I'd driven a few more blocks, things seemed to smooth out and were relatively normal.
When I got home, I made a quick visual inspection of my front tires. They looked a little low, but I attributed that to cold weather contraction and didn't worry too much about it.
The next two days, all my driving was done in the wife's car. About 3:15 Saturday, I needed to run a few errands, and as I began backing out of the garage, I got my second signal that the shit would soon be in the fan: the car didn't want to roll onto the driveway. I got out, took a look, and damned if both front tires weren't nearly flat. This was the kind of situation for which my favorite 12-letter cussword was invented.
There's an Exxon station exactly one mile from my driveway, and being the optimistic genius that I am, I decided I might have just enough remaining tire pressure to crawl down there, pump up, and get to the tire store before they closed. I was about halfway there when reality smacked me right between the eyes. I don't know if you've ever tried driving on a flat tire, but it's slow going. Two flats is even slower.
By the time I limped into the gas station, both tires were completely deflated and were coming off the rims. One had started to shred. I've been changing tires for as many years as I've been driving, but this was the first time I'd ever had two flats at the same time and by now, there weren't enough cusswords in my whole vocabulary to fulfill the requirements of the situation.
I'll skip most of the gory details, but I called a towing service and managed to get into the Discount Tires store just ahead of the 5:00 PM deadline. In less than an hour, I was about five hundred dollars lighter but I had new rubber all around and was back in business.
The moral of the story: When the wheels on your car send a signal that things aren't exactly like they should be, take care of the problem right then. This is not something that I had to learn; I knew it already. Sometimes, though, I need a grim reminder.
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