Check Your Battery
First: Thanks for all the kind messages about last week’s deep-dive into family histories. After just a week, it’s already my most-read entry here. It was a joy to write, and I seriously doubt it will be the last you’ll hear from me about such things, as though the reading I did, let alone the writing about it, I have unofficially put myself forward as this generation’s family archivist. Oops!
Toward the end of last week’s Metaforia, I summarized a letter that my paternal grandmother wrote after a weeks-long hospital stay, while she was recuperating at home. This letter was itself written over the course of a few weeks, and Grandma Ruth excuses herself periodically, saying that she’s expended her energy for the time being and needs to go lie down again.1 In the body of the letter, she describes her time in the hospital, often with extremely limited mobility. She describes lying in bed for hours at night, even if she’s awake for much of that time. It’s just that she can’t really move around; she has no choice but to rest.
We’ll come back to that. On to the present day!
It’s fixed now, but a few weeks ago, I noticed I had a slow leak in one of my car’s front tires. I was at the garage (shoutout to Montri Auto Repair) this Thursday when the mechanic investigated the problem: a gleaming metal screw right between the treads. Linda, who runs the place (and greets me by name when I call), told me that they get someone in with a nail or a screw through their tire every day. “Why are there so many screws on the road?” I wondered aloud.
Truly, in this life, there are a lot of screws on the road.
I hadn’t taken my car to the shop to have my tire patched. Oh, I had planned to take my car in for that reason at some point last week, or this one. The slow-leak issue arose just before I went to the Midwest for 10 days, so I planned to address it upon my return. But a greater urgency forced the matter: my car’s battery died. And how’s this for a screw in the road: the two problems were related, and the battery death was a little tiny bit my fault.
I have (and highly recommend, despite the coming story) a little portable air compressor in my car that I use to add air to my tires periodically. My car helpfully alerts me when my tire pressure is low, but it was the air compressor that made me realize there was more going on than just a routine maintenance situation. I knew, after coming home from ten days away — days where, in Los Angeles, the temperature was swinging by 30ºF from morning to night — that pesky tire would need refilling before I took it anywhere. Like to work on the morning after my return. And, you know, eventually to the shop to get the tire patched. Soon. Seriously.
Sure enough, that morning the tire pressure was as low as it had been since the problem began. So I plugged my trusty air compressor into the little cigarette lighter outlet2 and got down to business like the independent city gal I am, mentally compensating for the fact that the tires were cold. So smart, I am.
I was about 5 psi short of my goal when it occurred to me that I may have, shall we say, screwed myself. Does anybody remember, a few weeks into lockdown 2020, hearing stories of people trying to move their cars only to find that their poor, neglected car batteries had nothing to give? The auxiliary port draws power from the battery, just like any other bell or whistle on a vehicle. I’d left my car untouched for over a week. Had I just used the last dregs of the battery to fill my leaky tire?
By now, you know that I had done exactly that. But it was worse than a mere jump-start situation. Even after an hour of driving around on the jumped battery3, the thing still refused to start our car without holding electrical hands with some other car’s battery. Endless gratitude to two Nicks and my wonderful roommate Megan for their help in this matter notwithstanding, this was a major screw. The battery had to be replaced. A few stressful hours and a scant few hundred dollars later, both of my car problems were fixed.
So, yeah. I drained my battery tending to one problem, leaving me with no energy to do anything else. Sound familiar?
Though I never knew my Grandma Ruth, I have long known what her basic schedule was like. Have you ever heard the children’s nursery rhyme that goes, “Wash on Monday/Iron on Tuesday/Bake on Wednesday”…etc?4 That was Grandma Ruth. My dad has told me, and his siblings corroborated, that she would work so hard keeping house (and, I now know, answering the call of half the neighbors and every Lutheran in Albuquerque Heights) during the week that she would be sick and have to spend one of those days in bed. I think it was Thursday. Sick on Thursday. But presumably well again in time for choir practice.
The only reason Ruth Flaxbart even had time to write that precious letter is that she was forced — by a freak accident, by a cast past her elbow, by a broken heel, by pins in her wrist! — to slow all the way down. She had to make her famous ten-minute icing two minutes at at time. She had to wait for someone else to stop by and put her cakes in the oven. Those are not metaphors — those are literal things this woman describes doing in her letter, because even in her incapacity, she was doing everything she could to not stop. I imagine that little bit of doing helped distract her from the pain and fright of her ordeal. Thinking about this refusal-to-stop fills me with a mix of admiration and bittersweet recognition.
Guilt over rest is something I understand well. Beyond culture, I think it might be in my blood. In this generation, the language and culture of “self care” has sprung up as an attempt to counteract the notion that idleness is laziness. This language was swiftly commodified by marketers of bath bombs and face masks — all the best stuff is usually co-opted by marketers. True self-care sounds great to me in theory, but the only way it’s ever worked for me in practice is when I accept that, unrested, I am not able to serve my community, my loved ones, or my purpose.
In short: it is pointless to have full tire pressure on a car that won’t start.
In humans, as in cars, idling charges your battery.
She does this more often in the early pages, which I find part of the beauty of this document; we watch her recuperate in real time.
Technically the “12V auxiliary power outlet”, as mine doesn’t even have a lighter, and why should it, but that’s still how I think of this car feature
and, as I’d come to find out, even after two hours of charging at the garage and a drive across town to Century City
A similar schedule is also invoked in a version of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” that focuses on the week’s chores.
You'll be interested in building another metaphor when you find out about hybrid batteries.