Car trouble brings a father together with his teen son

I didn’t plan to see my 18-year-old son much on Monday night.

Will had baseball practice, and then he planned to hang out with friends for the rest of the evening. I was headed home after work for a weekly fellowship group with members from my church.

As I was leaving the office, my phone rang. It was Will, saying he was standing in the parking lot of that sketchy looking building off Macon Road across from the school district headquarters.

One of his tires had been slashed by something protruding from the curb.

I knew what that meant. He drives my old truck, which has a spare tire rack under the chassis. And this spare tire rack used to have a spare tire in it.

Back when I drove the truck everyday, I hit a pothole or a rut or something and broke part of the mechanism that held the spare tire in place, so that the tire was hanging lopsided, appearing to be ready to fall into the road any minute and cause a wreck with whatever wide-eyed motorist happened to be following me.

After one of those motorists alerted me to the problem, I dropped the tire and threw it in the back of the truck. Later, when I realized that if the tire wasn’t stolen it was probably going to rot in the back of a hot truck, I rolled it into my garage and left it there.

Yes, I am a gifted problem-solver – provided that one of my future problems was not having a flat tire.

Will started driving the truck not long after his brother Robert left for college.

Robert, who is studying engineering, had an old Jeep that he restored for his senior project. When I say restored, I mean that he drove it around town – his mother and I had a rule that he could not take the Jeep out of the city limits – and whenever it broke down on the side of the road, he would restore it back to working order.

Sometimes restoring back to working order meant that the FedEx man would show up on our doorstep with a giant box filled with parts, and then Robert would give us a heads up that we might be seeing an expense on one of our credit cards.

Anyway, his brother Will will not be studying engineering or doing anything involving moving parts. He takes after his old man that way. The day Robert left for school, Will started driving the Jeep. That same day, it broke down on the side of the road (not a surprise), and stayed broken down (also not a surprise).

We had it towed home, rolled it into the garage, and it’s been there ever since. I bought a car and let Will use the truck.

Which brings us to Monday night. I picked up Will alongside Macon Road and we drove home and got the spare tire. Then we drove back down to Macon Road, where we found several key pieces missing from the truck jack.

So we pieced together the truck jack with the jack and tools from my car, put everything on a chunk of concrete and then went to work. If you’re thinking we were unqualified to do this, you’re exactly right.

But the jack only toppled once and nobody was injured. Eventually we mounted the spare tire and secured the bolts and then drove to a gas station to fill the tire with more air.

We won’t be working for a NASCAR pit crew anytime soon. It took us more than an hour, which was way longer than it should have. I missed my fellowship group and Will missed hanging out with his friends.

But I don’t think we missed much. He’s a great kid with a busy life and we don’t spend enough time together.

So I’m glad he had a flat tire and called me for help.

This story was originally published April 20, 2018 at 12:32 PM with the headline "Car trouble brings a father together with his teen son."