Howdy,
My seatbelt got stuck …
My seatbelt got stuck …
My seatbelt got stuck …
My … make it stop.
Is it a story?
A rap?
A song on LP stuck in a deep belt, scratched vinyl screeching smooth sounds to a stop?
So, today, my seatbelt got stuck.
And I need words, so I thought “My seatbelt got stuck …” qualified as a phrase with potential for story. I ran it through my mind and said it repeatedly to Sarah, as a joke. Which, she didn’t think funny. It sounded like … just kidding; I won’t make you read or hear blank blank blank blank … again. At least not in triplicate.
It does have great potential, though.
I mean, if we’re jumping into narrative and the car, or worse — better, if it’s a story? — a 15-passenger van full of people is sinking quickly in a wide, brown river moving swiftly, so swiftly the rushing current has the sagging vehicle already hundreds of yards downriver, then my seatbelt got stuck is bad news for our first-person narrator.
And high drama.
Or, if you’re in a virtual reality Jurassic World experience rolling around in the glass-encased Gyrosphere and it’s time to bail due to uncomfortably strong dinosaur breath, then there’s story in “my seatbelt got stuck …”
It’s called panic. Horror.
For me, it only means, I had a rushed morning, a bad start to the day, a sweaty wrestling match in my SUV with the stupid backseat seatbelt, because, you see, my seatbelt got stuck.
And I didn’t know how to get it out.
I tugged.
And sweated.
I pushed and tugged and pulled.
Perspiring in the cold, winter morn. Steamed breath and a layer of sweat between me and my clothes, which with every ounce of grossness were becoming more and more likely the ones I’d have to wear to our morning Bible study coming quick on the clock. Muttering frustrations, like I can’t believe this stupid thing is happening, and it’s really happening because I can’t get the release end of the belt out from between both seats.
Crazy. But not happening. Not the release.
Seriously.
After giving up and switching things around to be roughly on time for our morning event, I told Sarah solving the stuck seatbelt would be either 1) A tricky brain puzzle with a solution of ease when discovered, or 2) An amazing accomplishment of brute force.
But I had been trying both, and I wasn’t passing any IQ test or proving to be the beastly physical specimen you all imagine me to be.
In the afternoon I faced off with my stuck seatbelt again, without the time pressure of the morning.
Yep, still stuck.
A neighbor said hello and we talked for a moment and I explained how I’d picked up a large box representing our boys’ Christmas present that morning and how I’d had to lay down the back seats, first one and then the other, to make room in the very back for the very big box and how I’d had to remove the three (3!) carseats from that backseat row and when I’d gone to put the three(!) carseats back I couldn’t buckle one of them in because my seatbelt got stuck, and since he seemed willing to help in some way or at least curious for a peek at my bumbling stupidity he made his way around to the side of my vehicle and I fiddled at the click-button of the belt and started to explain how I didn’t see how I’d ever get that wide, hard-plastic piece out from wedged between the hard-plastic edges of the seats coming together and how I’d tried laying down the seats in different combinations to angle it out when I realized he couldn’t see with me in the way so to give my friend a better view of my project for the next unforeseeable amount of hours I pulled the back on the seat — feeling the mechanics and motion to be the same as the way I’d done all the other times — and the whole seat came forward, leaving a good cubit of space between the seat sections and a dangling seatbelt just waiting to be flopped back up on the seat for use strapping in a child’s carseat, one of three crammed shoulder-to-shoulder.
And just like that, my seatbelt got unstuck.
And I was so thankful, because, before that … you got it, my seatbelt got stuck.
—Billy
Reading. Writing. Living.
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