by Tom Boyce
It was just a day or two before Christmas in 2002 when I came across the young woman stranded on the side of the freeway. I was going into town to buy a Christmas gift for my brother, a radio-controlled airplane. I was looking forward to giving the gift to John because I knew it was something that he had wanted for a long time, but would never buy for himself.
For the first time in my life, I had enough money that I could afford to buy the gift for my brother. As I passed Highway 6 on I-10 headed into Houston, I glanced over to the other side of the freeway and saw the woman outside of her car with her hood up.
It wasn’t the first time I’d come across that scene. If you live in or near a big city long enough, you’re apt to come across dozens if not hundreds of similar sights. So maybe because it was Christmastime or maybe because I saw the car seat in the back seat or maybe it was the way she looked with her shoulders stooped and her hand to her forehead,
but I felt compelled to exit the freeway, turn back towards Katy, and stop to see if I could help.
I pulled up next to her car on the feeder road and, with my bum hip, tried to negotiate my way over to her car across the ditch.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
She was so distraught that she didn’t even see me coming. She whirled around in surprise. I was well aware of the fear that might be going through her…a young woman being approached along the side of the road by a strange man…so I stayed where I was and didn’t try and close the distance between us.
“My car just died” She said. “Nothing works…and I just bought that battery!”
“So it wouldn’t work before and you had a battery installed and it worked then?” I asked.
“Yeah..but I must have bought a bad battery because now it’s dead”
“It’s not your battery”, I said. “It’s your alternator”
“My alternator?”
“It’s that silver thing right there with the belt running around it. It keeps your battery charged.”
She looked hesitant. “How much does it cost to get one fixed?”
“Last time I had one fixed it cost about fifty dollars for the alternator and a hundred for labor. Plus, you’re looking at about another fifty for a tow.”
“TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS!?”
“About that…probably a bit more”
I thought she looked distraught and dejected before but my last sentence just seemed to let all of the air out of her,
“I don’t have two hundred dollars. I just spent my last sixty on that battery”
It wasn’t a hard decision. I thought back on all of the times in my life when two hundred dollars was all that was standing between where I was and where I needed to be. I thought of the many times I had been the recipient of charity from others and, perhaps more importantly, the times when that charity was withheld…the times when I swore that I would never ever make another human being feel the way I felt then, like money was more important to everyone than I was.
Two hundred dollars would mean the world to this young woman and her baby and it wouldn’t even make a dent to my bottom line; so I took out my cell phone and dialed my mechanic.
When my son started to drive, I made arrangements with a mechanic in Katy so that John-Ross would not have to wait in order to get something on his car fixed. He could just pull in, get whatever he needed done done, and the mechanic would bill me for it later.
It was a pretty good arrangement and the mechanic was someone I trusted to not take advantage of the situation. The one fly in the ointment was that he bought all of his parts from a parts store in Katy where the guy knew that you had to go to Mason Road to the nearest competitor and so he marked up his parts a bit more. He wasn’t shy about it either. If you ever went into his parts store, Bill would let you know that he was more expensive than the chain store on Mason Road and then launch into a narrative about how you should just shut up and buy his over-priced spark plugs because he needed the extra profit in order to compete and wouldn’t it be sad if the chain stores drove the little guy out of business.
I told the mechanic the situation, asked him to tow the young woman’s car to his garage, give her and her baby a ride home, fix the car and then deliver it to her. I told him that I would take care of the bill.
The young mother began to cry and thank me. It was all a bit embarrassing so I just nodded and waved and told her she should wait in her car until the tow truck came. Then I turned and left to finish my Christmas shopping.
A few days after Christmas, I got an invoice from the mechanic. I opened it to discover that I owed him $39.87. I looked at it again and saw that the only item I was being charged for was the alternator. There was no charge for a tow or labor, This, I determined, was an invoice that I would have to pay in person.
I walked into the garage with my invoice in hand. The mechanic was busy under the hood of another car. I held the invoice up.
“This is the cheapest alternator I ever had to replace”
The mechanic never even looked up. “You think you’re the only one that keeps Christmas?” he asked.
I chuckled to myself. Then I said, “Yeah..but still, the last alternator I bought from you cost me over fifty dollars. Are they going down in price?”
The mechanic looked up from under the hood. “When I told Bill at the parts store what was going on, he wanted a piece of the action as well so he only charged you wholesale”
“I suppose I should be grateful you left a piece for me” I said.
“Well….we didn’t want to cut you out completely”
And so it happened that 2 millennia after the three magi brought gifts of Gold Frankincense, and Myrrh to one young mother and her child, three other men, perhaps not quite as wise, but nevertheless, compelled by the same spirit, imparted gifts of money, time, and profit to another mother and her child.
It became my favorite Christmas.
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