The "At Least She Missed the Mailbox" Story

It was an ordinary day. The big event was almost over. The author of "The Shack", William Paul Young was signing autographs. Paul has sold over 25 million copies of his book and draws large crowds to his talks about his life. Tonight there was over 750people in attendance at the Lancaster Bible College. The autograph line stretched around the auditorium. Everyone wanted to share their story with him as well asgetting their book, or in some cases books, autographed. He obliged with a smile and kind words and always a hug. He must have hugged almost everyone in the room, except me. I was the one with the camera taking pixs of all the hugging. All this hugging takes time and I was getting tired. Already 10:00 PM. I had planned to take Carol home with me, but she saw that I was tired and told me she would get a ride home with Debbie after everyone had left. OK. Debbie is a co-worker who helped organize the event with Carol and their boss at the Parish Resource Center, Dave. I headed home and was relaxing in front of the TV when I saw the lights coming in the driveway. A few minutes later the door from the garage opened and Carol said, "Come quick, Debbie is in trouble." Not knowing what kind of trouble I jumped up and ran for the door. Seems Debbie was leaving and misjudged the direction of our driveway and went too far to the right and ended up in our ground cover. Now, I should tell you that the ground cover drops off from our driveway on the right side at a 45 degree angle. It drops down about four feet to the grass by the street. And ..... Debbie's caris now hanging there with it's back wheels in the air and the two front wheels in the ground cover. Hung up with the center of the car caught on the ground cover. I approach and tell her I will try to push her car forward. Her seat belt is holding her in place on the front seat. No luck! Now what? Carol says, "Why don't you go get your big rope and hook it to the Mountaineer and pull her back up?" "Good idea," I say. I find the 1/2" thick rope, back the 4-wheel drive Merc out of the garage and fasten Debbie's car toour towing hitch. Put the car in the lowest gear and slowly draw the rope tight. Then I pulled her car right back up the bank she had gone over. Luckily her Toyota Pruis is a fairly light weight car. Yelled to Carol to tell Debbie not to accelerate in reverse and run into the back of my car. When I was satisfied that she was back far enough from the bank, I eased up on the rope and got out and untied the rope from both cars. We were all relieved that everyone was OK. Remarkably there was no damage done to the car or the ground cover. One more hug was in order for the evening. That being the one Debbie gave me for my help. Itwas another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy. PS - Funny, but the whole time this is occurring, I am thinking this has to be a story for my blog, but I just don't feel I should take the time to go get my camera and take a photo. The stress level was high enough without taking photos to emphasize it. The photo that appears here shows the area to the right of my mail box where the car fell off. PPS - Top pix shows Carol on the left with friend Debbie, middle is our driveway with mailbox to the right and bottom is the ground cover to the right of the mailbox.