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On a January Friday evening in Fjord, Wisconsin, with the outdoor temperature at minus ten and dropping, the only café in town was doing a surprisingly brisk business in fish dinners. Surprisingly, that is, for so cold a night. Most of the customers were local folk, but two others were large ladies, senior citizens suspectedly from somewhere else, each with a wheeled walker to assist her mobility, and who, when they had finished their meal at about seven p.m., went out the back door and into the alley behind the café, where they had parked a Chevrolet Cavalier in what was by then foot-deep snowdrifts. They found, alas, someone had parked a king-cab pickup truck so close beside the driver’s side of the Chevy that even a regular-sized person full of fish would not have been able to swing the driver-side door wide enough to allow entrance to the vehicle, and so they, the large ladies with walkers, rolled themselves back inside the warm café and explained their situation to the proprietor, who made an announcement for all to hear, but no one confessed to owning the truck. Someone speculated that the truck might belong to someone obtaining refreshment in a nearby tavern. Someone else wondered whether its driver was perhaps visiting a resident of any of several nearby apartment units.
While well-meaning Fjordians debated the likely success of sending someone to seek the truck owner elsewhere, one old fellow, having just finished his meal, went out into the cold and snow and recognized a possible means of solving the situation. He came back and asked the Chevy owner if she would like to give him her keys and let him climb into the driver’s seat from the passenger side. She said, “Sure, that would be fine.”
Oh, but wait. Before the old guy accepted the keys or probably the electronic car-starting whatchacallit, he noticed a not-nearly-so-old and quite-likely-more-limber fellow, the Fjord High School band teacher, who had apparently just finished his own fish dinner, and so the old guy said something to the effect of, “You, sir, would surely be a better candidate for climbing across a Chevy Cavalier than I; would you therefore be willing...?” And the band teacher replied, “Of course.”
The old guy and his entourage—wife, father, and a visiting Ohio cousin—had not parked in the alley but on Main Street, so they went out the front door of the café, piled into the old guy’s car, fired up the engine, set the heater on high, turned west at the corner, and, as they crossed the alley, were able to discern that the Chevy Cavalier was now out in the clear, with headlights blazing and clouds of healthy exhaust rising, as the car prepared to warmly receive its cargo of wheeled walkers and well-nourished riders for a journey into the night.
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