It’s supposed to be so easy.   An envelop arrives in the mail from the Department of Motor Vehicles, informing you that it’s time to renew your license plates – which in this pollution- ridden corner of the world also means taking your car to have its emissions tested.   They stick a tube on the end of your car’s tail pipe – they press a couple of buttons – and a couple of minutes later they give you a computer print-out informing you that your car has passed the test,  at which point you head to the DMV, hand over $75, and get one of those darling little stickers to affix to your license plate.   Simple and straightforward?  You would think so.

My tale of woe began on Monday, when I took my Santa Fe to the Kenosha Valvoline Oil Change place to have my emissions tested, right after getting my oil changed.  (I was about 1500 miles overdue for that, but for me, that’s pretty much ahead-of-schedule!)  Unfortunately, they never even bothered to do the test because they noticed that my Check Engine light was on- and that automatically causes the car to flunk the test, even if the reason for the warning light has nothing to do with the car’s emission levels.  Their advice was for me to take the car to Auto Zone to figure out what was triggering the warning light- and then get it taken care of.  So off I went to Auto Zone, where a friendly guy hooked up a contraption to my steering column and detected four codes that were tripping the alarm.  That meant this was a job for the pros, so I set up an appointment for the next morning at Racine Hyundai . . . and 11 hours and $911 later, I drove away with the Check Engine light off, happy as could be.

But the next morning – not right away,  but when I was driving from WGTD to Carthage,  that infernal light came on again . . . as though that expensive trip to the garage had never occurred.   I called my “friend” Joe at Hyundai and – through gritted teeth – told him that we were right back where we started.  He apologized and invited me to drop the car off the next morning (Thursday), which I did – but even by 6:00 that evening they still had not figured out what the issue was.   It was not until 2:30 Friday afternoon that my phone finally rang and the voice on the other end said those four splendid words:  Your Car Is Done.   And what was almost a bigger relief than that was when I picked up the car tonight and was handed an invoice with a balance due of   $0.00.    After the hours that the technician spent checking out nearly every major system in the car,  I would not have been surprised to have been charged a princely sum just for the guy’s time.   But they charged me nothing-  and I could not be more grateful and relieved, because I know that some people have been forced to spend thousands of dollars just to get that stupid little light extinguished.  Next to those tales of woe,  I got off very easily.

And in fact, there were plenty of silver linings . . . one of which was that for several days I got to drive Kathy’s car instead of my own,  which is newer, classier, cleaner, and just more fun to drive (except that it doesn’t have Sirius XM, so I can’t listen to the Metropolitan Opera channel.  But that’s a relatively minor sacrifice to make.)  I got to take her to work three mornings this week, which gave us some extra time together,  which was really nice.   And if all this hadn’t happened, then I never would have had the fun experience at Auto Zone of having one of the guys behind the counter – Larry – recognize my voice and say “Hey, you sound like one of the morning guys on the Gateway radio station!”  (He turned out to be an avid Morning Show listener.)   And when that first whopper of a bill was presented to me, at least I had a credit card on which I could charge the bill.   (There are plenty of people who couldn’t possibly pay a bill like that.)    And it was good for Kathy and I to live with one car for most of the week, if for no other reason than for the way we had to think through the logistics of the day and do a little less mindless chasing from here to there.  So there were silver linings galore.

So why was I so miserable and distracted all week long?  Why did I allow this business about my car to predominate my every waking thought?  In the middle of conducting radio interviews or teaching voice lessons or leading rehearsals, part of my brain could not stop thinking about my car and worrying about how all this was going to resolve itself – grousing about a maddening system in which a car fails an emissions test even when there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that car’s emission levels – about the carelessness of the guys who supposedly fixed the car in the first place – and mostly about how this was the kind of complication in my life that I just didn’t need at a time when I’m up to my eyeballs in Les Miserables,  one of the most formidable challenges of my professional life.  If there was ever a time when I needed life to follow its predictable script, it was now.  Instead, I found myself contending with this irritating headache.  I lost count of how many times I was tempted to scream . . .  and I was truly horrified at some of the words that crossed my mind as I imagined dramatic scenarios in which I told off the guys at Hyundai, or the person behind the counter at the DMV.   Heck, I was ready to call Ken Wainscott from WISN channel 12 in Milwaukee, who is well-known for doing advocacy pieces in which he pursues cases in which ordinary citizens have been treated unjustly and manages to find them restitution.  I actually imagined that Ken Wainscott would do a whole investigative piece about my plight.   My plight.   I shudder to think of how easily and naturally I would speak about my situation in such overwrought terms.

I think of myself as a very positive person who doesn’t dwell unduly on the negative and chooses instead to focus on life’s many blessings.  But what the last few days has shown me is that I’m good at accentuating the positive when life is mostly positive . . . and when there is little or nothing to upset the fragile equilibrium of my complicated life.   But when something comes along like car trouble to throw a wrench into the proceedings,  I actually have a lot more trouble dealing with that than I ever realized.  I love my life – I really do – and I hate it when anything intrudes on what is otherwise, for all its craziness, a pretty idyllic life.

I think the other thing about which I’m embarrassed is that I would allow myself to get so thoroughly upset about and distracted by a thing in my life.  I like to think of myself as someone who dwells much more on the precious intangibles of life – like music or laughter – rather on the accumulation of luxuries.   But the headache of car trouble bothered me in a way and to a degree that really caught me by surprise. Granted, a car is an exceptionally important thing in one’s life …. but it’s still just a thing.   It’s not the heart and soul of life itself,  but you would have almost thought so judging from the intensity of my upset.

If anything helped me to keep this frustrating headache in something close to proper perspective, it was the day that I saw a photo on Facebook featuring the smiling face of a guy named Gregg,  who is the father of Mike, one of my voice students.  It’s not for me to recount all that Gregg has been through except to say that he has been through a truly brutal health ordeal.   The photo I saw was of Gregg in a hospital bed,  giving a brave thumbs up and holding a sign referring to his last chemotherapy session.  I don’t mind saying that one glance at that photo was enough to make me feel stupid and shallow and foolish for allowing something like car trouble to so thoroughly spoil my outlook.  It also made me feel like the world’s biggest hypocrite that I would compose a song like “Mercy and Love” and then fail to live up to the high ideals of its lyrics.   We might not like it when life gets complicated or frustrating, but thank goodness for the lessons of humility that our frustrations so often teach us.

I’m reminded of a book by someone in the Kennedy family who said that when you’re part of a family that has tasted the kind of tragedy and disaster that they have,  then any of life’s others troubles amount to nothing more than Burned Mashed Potatoes.   My headache with the car this week?  At the time, it felt like something straight out of the Book of Job. But in the grand scheme of things, it was nothing more than Burned Mashed Potatoes.   My hope is that the next time life turns a little bit sour,  I won’t have to see the photo of a hospitalized friend to keep a proper sense of perspective.  Life is way too short and much too precious for us to dwell on the occasional Burned Mashed Potatoes along the way.