Bringing back the dead

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Believe it or not, I have never had a dead battery in all my 21+ years of driving a car.  So when I stepped outside after a workout with friends, my exact words were, “Tina!  My car won’t start!  Help!!!” 
Tina is a rather resourceful woman, a lovely friend, and was also quick to respond with jumper cables.  She turned her car around so that our vehicles were nose to nose, pulled the cables from her trunk, and handed them to me.
As it turned out, neither one of us knew exactly what we were doing which must have been quite a sight—two sweaty women in brightly colored clothes standing there in a parking lot, trying to look confident but entirely afraid of blowing ourselves into smithereens. 
“Why isn’t there a poem or something to remember how to hook up these cables?” I asked.  I felt like a complete moron.
With the wonderment of the smart phone comes unlimited answers, and while sifting through the various pages, each claiming that they offered “the only safe way to jumpstart a car,” I realized that no two methods were the same.
There were pictures and how-to videos and step-by-step detailed instructions that were all completely different from all of the other ones.  Frustrated, we began calling people we thought could help us and realized their methods were all different as well.  Finally, a man pulled up in his car near us and I thought we had been saved.
“Excuse me,” I asked.  “We think we’re going to explode ourselves and wondered if you could help us jump my car.”
He kindly got out to help, stood there and scratched his head and said, “I haven’t done this in awhile.”  I politely excused him without demanding he hand over his man-card and he drove away.  Tina and I were on our own, but being two educated women who had just done two hours of weights and cardio, there was no way we shouldn’t be able to succeed.
Following one person’s instructions, we connected the cables as we were directed to do.  No luck.
We readjusted and finally, with a few last second prayers, I turned the key to my beloved vehicle and heard it turn over and start up.  Being women we did not high five or “bro hug.”  We full out embraced each other and jumped up and down and cheered like goobers and held our heads a little higher.  Ingenuity, the ability to ask questions, and good ol’ girlfriend teamwork had prevailed once again.
(Because I am one who needs those poems or pneumonic devices in order to remember how to do things, here’s my Public Service Announcement for the week:  Love Root Beer? Drink Root Beer.  Live car- connect red, then black.  Dead car, red, then black.  Feel free to write that on your man-card, should you need it.)


Written/published 8/31/14

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