A Little More Serendipity

How do you get rid of Serendipity?

I’m not asking some kind of philosophical question; I’m talking about my car.

I was hoping to sell what’s left of that thirteen-year-old Nissan I so comically named Serendipity: a car with good brakes, great tires and and a shiny frame, which sometimes jerked when I hit the gas and smelled suspiciously of mildew, with a dry rotted wiring harness hidden under the heat shield and a host of junkyard parts I didn’t know about. The dealer had me sign the “as is” contract because the mechanic in Pittsburgh either didn’t see the bad parts or was in cahoots with the dealer for all I know, and told me the car was fine. I got swindled.

It’s needed repair after repair in the two years I’ve tried to make it work. I think it’s been up on bricks more often than it’s been driven. If I hadn’t found out my neighbor was an expert backyard mechanic, we wouldn’t have even gotten that much use out of it. One of the pistons died this summer, and that’s when Jimmy said it was time to give up. We’ve been trapped at home doing nothing since June. I only got my precious swim in the lake once.

I don’t know how to tell you how frustrated I am– and how embarrassed. I got tricked, and it’s hurt  my whole family.

We finally caught up to what we were behind on rent when I got sick and stayed sick for two months: owing zero instead of hundreds was a blessed feeling.  Jimmy the Mechanic promised to go with me and do all the talking when we see his friend the car dealer, the nice one, the one who wouldn’t cheat a friend of Jimmy and might give me a discount. With the help of a few friends, I scraped together a little less than half of what I’d need for a down payment. Jimmy offered to help once more: he has a cousin who was going to buy his old jeep for parts, and would surely buy Serendipity as well. She has plenty of parts left to salvage and sell; that might make up the rest of the money for the down payment, or close to it. I could drive the new car straight to the BMV a mile away and have Serendipity’s old plate assigned to it, and be done with this.

But then the man didn’t call Jimmy back.

He’s been trying to get the man to call him back for days. He needs to get rid of the old jeep so he can make ends meet, and I need to get rid of Serendipity to get a working car.

If this goes on much longer, all that I managed to set aside will be eaten by bills and rent again.

Last week I thought I’d be able to drive to Mass on Michaelmas today, but that didn’t happen.

I went for another prayer walk in my neighborhood, talking to Archangel Michael.

It wasn’t hot as it was when I took that walk two weeks ago. It was blessedly cool, overcast, and misty. It was raining, but not the kind of rain that soaks you, only the gentle rain that feels like a kiss. That rain is a kind of stim my autism greatly loves.

Some of the trees are changing now. There were places where I walked under a canopy streaked with saffron and orange, though most of it was green. The world smelled of earth and honey and petrichor, as earth ought to smell in Autumn.

I thought about driving Serendipity to Columbus to see Holly the Witch and scrap my FIRST car, that other black Nissan, after the accident. About the homeless woman who Holly had let sleep in my car for a few weeks, to stay out of the cold, and how grateful she’d been. How I’d managed to get her a little help, a sleeping bag and a coat. That woman had been through so much. She was a friendly old lady who should have been sitting in a rocking chair playing with grandchildren, not living in a car and turning tricks to stay alive. She should never have suffered all the things that she suffered.

That woman isn’t homeless anymore. She found an apartment last year– she credits Holly’s prayers for this.

Being able to help her was serendipity if anything was.

I kept talking to Archangel Michael, telling him how frustrated I was and how I just needed a few more lucky turns. I’ve had a terrible time, but it was starting to be happy this past year. I have neighborhood friends now. Adrienne’s thriving at school. I’ll never stop longing for Adrienne to have a real brother or sister, but I have many honorary grandchildren who visit the garden. and I love them. I like all the writing projects I’m doing, inching bit by bit towards making ends meet. How many authors end up living on their writing? If only I hadn’t gotten sick and lost the car in June. If only things had continued to get better. If only I hadn’t been such a fool when I wasted the thousands of dollars that were a gift in the first place.

I thought about the first time that car broke down, in winter, just months after buying her. That horrible, isolated, lonely winter was the reason I threw in the towel on homeschooling Adrienne. I didn’t have the means to drive her to museums and other field trips anymore. I couldn’t drive her to hangouts with the other homeschoolers. I gave up. I enrolled her in the public school that’s walking distance from our house. She is thriving, getting excellent grades, surrounded by new friends. She wants to be a teacher someday. That was the best choice I ever made.

That was also serendipity.

There was a honk just then. I looked up and waved at Jimmy, who was driving by to pick up his wife from her shift. I had not known Jimmy as anybody by a face to wave and smile at before he saw me leaning over Serendipity’s engine and asked me what was the matter. That’s how I found out I had a neighbor who was an expert mechanic and a generous soul. I got to know Jimmy’s boy and started to teach him to garden. I think that happenstance was the breaking point where I stopped hating Appalachia.

That, too, was serendipity.

At this point in my walk, I rounded the corner to the place where South Bend Boulevard becomes Belleview Boulevard. Belleview is how the neighborhood known as LaBelle got its name, and the French is correct: there is a beautiful view to be seen there. You have to know just where to stand, because the mulberry trees block it, but you can usually see across the cliff’s edge, all the way downtown to the Ohio river and the beginning of West Virginia, if you’re in the right place.

Today, West Virginia was invisible in the mist. But I could see a bit of downtown. I could see the trees on the other hilltop known as Pleasant Heights, across Washington Street. They were still green. I hadn’t missed Peak Color in the state parks yet. I had a little time to get out of this predicament and secure a car and get back to the hikes that keep me sane at last.

Over at the end of Pleasant Heights, I could see the old hospital with the dormitory where I lived the very first year I came to Steubenville, nearly eighteen years ago, thinking I was only staying for a two year degree. I was going to learn philosophy and Catholic bioethics at Franciscan University, save unborn babies, prove the existence of God to the silly unbelievers, and become a saint.

My heart sank.

I don’t want to know the terrible things I know about Catholicism anymore. I don’t want to be the person who was so confident and then got lost in this paradox. I wish I could either abandon my belief in Christ or be stupid enough to think that Christianity is easy, safe and unproblematic.

No, I don’t. I just want to find a way to reconcile myself to the real Christ that I truly believe exists, here in the real world instead of the fanciful one I was taught was real.

Just down the way was the place my car ground to a stop, when the wiring harness fell to pieces and killed the alternator, which killed the battery. I’d been all the way out in Robinson an hour away. It was very lucky– serendipitous, in fact– that the car waited until I was walking distance from home to break down, or God alone knows what could have happened.

The big flat building at the end of the street used to be a public school, but now it’s a house for an order of priests. They took out the playground that was there once upon a time, and put in a nice orderly vegetable garden. It’s the garden I would like to have, if I had a great big triple lot to myself. The trees on the other end of the garden are still green.

Sometimes deer come out of the woods to cross Belleview Boulevard, but there were no deer today. I wondered if the deer ever pestered that garden.

I thought of the kindness my neighbor had done me lately.

My soul hurts so much, and I’m so anxious, but I’m also learning to be happy.

This is a proof of the existence of God– or, at least, it is to me: that in this terrible world, where people are horrible and everything goes wrong, there are also good people and things that go right. That when I’ve been trapped in dire circumstances, I’ve also met wonderful friends and learned wonderful truths. The garden dies off in Autumn, but Autumn is so beautiful that it doesn’t hurt. People have terrible misfortune, but manage to find safety and new friends.  Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. The Son of God is murdered and in doing so tramples death.

It doesn’t make the bad things right, but the right is deeper than the bad things.

I am learning to be happy here.

I just need a little more serendipity, and life will be fine.