Day Of The Nail

 R left this morning to get some unsalted peanuts and a new scooper for our litter box at PetCo, then a flu shot and some groceries at Safeway. I returned to watching the Jimmy Dore Show on YouTube. She returned minutes later. Our left rear tire was flat. Again. This tire has been patched not quite a year ago. We called AAA and a truck arrived within a half hour. AAA is an amazing service. They always arrive in a timely fashion, even when they’re busy and the city is teeming with automotive mishaps, and get you back on the road in an embarrassingly short amount of time. AAA roadside assistance drivers are automotive wizards. The AAA driver changed the tire and discovered a big fat nail stuck in it. We speculated on where we might’ve driven over a nail in the road. The most likely culprit is a home remodeling project up the street, at the steep part of Bigelow where the road crests. It’s a bit dangerous there, the western sun in your eyes, people driving fast over the hill on the downside, people rocketing up. It’s amazing there aren’t more collisions there. This is where various workers, electricians, plumbers, glaziers and carpenters have been parking their trucks, half on the sidewalk, half off, creating yet more hazard. It’s also messy, bits of wood and glass and plaster strewn about. The nail might’ve fallen off of a truck. There are lots of remodeling projects and building construction in our neighborhood. Home expansion and remodeling has been going at fever pitch for the last few years. The intensity seems to increase with every catastrophe, the latest being Trump’s testing positive for Covid. We drove out to Carter Subaru on Aurora to get the tire patched. They’ve got a nice waiting room there. We found a desk with several stools and I got out my French edition of Les Chants de Maldoror, a New Directions English translation and a French dictionary. R brought Revenge of the Lawn, a collection of short stories by Richard Brautigan. It’s a nice waiting room, spacious, everyone wearing a mask. It was quiet as a library. Two women with a big white poodle sat together, the poodle's forelegs on one of the women’s lap as she caressed and petted him and he returned the affection with a big wet tongue. A middle-aged rather rugged looking man with a beard did paperwork at a small table. Another bearded man sat in an armchair reading a book. There was a TV on, but it was close captioned with the sound off. I wish they did this at the airport, where the TVs are ubiquitous. I wonder if we’ll go to the airport again. The pandemic feels endless. It keeps getting worse. And yet they’ve opened the fitness gyms. That’s insane. We prefer to exercise outside, where we’ve been able to work out a new running trail with fewer people to dodge. It was disappointing not to go for our usual run and feed the crows and scrub jays. It was a beautiful sunny day, uncharacteristically warm for early October. A warranty covered the tire repair, which helped take some of the sting out. We stopped at PetCo on the way back, got three big bags of unsalted peanuts and some canned cat food, and returned home. Hot dogs and three-bean salad for dinner, we watched people in the mountain villages of the Alpes-Maritime department in the south of France dig themselves out of the mud left when the rivers were engorged by three months of rain in ten hours, swelling over the banks and collapsing houses and tossing cars like dice. A man used a bow to shoot a rope across a river to use as a line to deliver food and other items to the villagers still trapped on the other shore.