Anecdotes can be comic if you’re not their protagonist/buffoon/simpleton/victim (take your pick). Slipping on a banana peel is no joke to the slipper (def. 2.). Memory still winces and molars grind at the mishap memorialized below, but words have been known to make lemonade out of lemons.
Cast your minds back to an ordinary winter morning in the American northeast. Picturesque snow powders evergreens and surfaces, nothing too troublesome, just enough to recall the snows of yesteryear. (“Ou sont les neiges d’antan?” – Francois Villon, poet/thief, France, 1431-1463.) A courteous worker on a too-long-deferred reconstruction project asks politely if Mister might move his car so a truck can pass. No problem, says – let’s call him – Carll, slipping on parka and slippers (def.1) and grabbing keys.
The polite good nature of this worker warms the cockles of Carll’s heart. What cockles are you’ll never guess, unless you’re a pedant, in which case what brings you here? This worker’s an Hispanic, presumably South American, as are his half-dozen pleasant, industrious and legitimate co-workers. Without them, this job would never get done, or would be done less capably. These are the immigrants one of our political parties decries as vermin.
Carll moves the car. Because it’s slightly snow-crusted, he leaves the engine running so the car can defrost without being scraped. This squandering of fossil fuel to spare one fossil healthful exertion is both ecologically and medically unconscionable, but this Carll, while he talks a good game, in fact falls frequently short of his ideals. He also bags undifferentiated kitchen garbage in convenient plastic. Given my druthers I’d have nothing to do with this pious fraud but who gets their druthers?
Carll drives the car sixty-plus miles to Manhattan to meet a pal for lunch. He is alone. Jane’s home with Henry, their dog. Carll is happy, listening to Dickens delectably read, occasionally toggling his sound system to a Handel organ concerto (Opus four). Sparse traffic, old friends, engaging listening, Jane, Henry, and himself all in health, running early, what’s not to like? Color Carll happy.
The car is a BMW – quite a mature BMW, but still. The Carll of his principles would be driving a comparatively inexpensive hybrid, but Carll really likes his BMW – besides, he’s retired, creaky, otherwise frugal, nice to animals, a Democrat, etc. (“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” – Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, 1090-1153).
Carll arrives at the Manhattan garage where he plans to park. The polite, jovial attendant (also an Hispanic, as it happens) routinely requests the car key. But where is the car key? It must be somewhere. BMW’s these days don’t run without a car key in range, do they? Carll and Jose think not. Carll practically undresses in the garage, unzipping backpack, tamping pockets, in search for the key that must be present, only isn’t. His hitherto beloved BMW won’t budge. Jose smiles, bless him, though he hardly feels like it: “Take your time.” Carll frantically calls BMW of Manhattan, where a true-blue American haughtily keeps him on hold then loses the call and his successor on the line, also true-blue, advises Carll a new key could be made available in four days at a cost of … don’t ask.
How Carll – and patient, smiling Jose – nudged the car aside and Carll with Jane’s help located the key (abandoned in that stupid parka pocket) and an emergency courier service at the cost of … don’t ask – sped said key from Poughquag to Manhattan – and Carll got home in time to cook Jane dinner completes our account.
This story must have a moral somewhere.