Flashes of Panic

On Friday I discovered that some time between when I left for Japan and, well, Friday afternoon, someone or some thing had pushed in the right front quarter panel of my car, right behind the front tire, in such a way that the passenger’s door would only open a few inches before catching on the panel in front of it.

This afternoon, out doing some other errands, I stopped at a body shop which had done some work on the car a few years ago. “I’m looking for advice,” I said. “Is it even worth calling this in to my insurance company, considering my deductible? Am I looking at a few hours or a few days?”

The guy from the office looked thoughtful for a minute, and said, “Do you want it good as new? Or do you want it to work?” I pointed at the softball ding behind the passenger’s door, and the dent over the rear window, and said, “It’s not going to be perfect; I want it to work and the car to go another 100,000 miles.”

He walked over to the open garage door and grabbed a rag of a towel and a thin tool that looked like a putty knife, and came back to my car. He wrapped the blade of the tool in the towel, inserted it in the gap between the door and the fender, and gently pried under the fender. POP! Most of the dent came out. He tested the door, then pried it a bit more. This time the door opened all the way, and it was pretty hard to tell there was a dent in the fender to begin with; the only sign is a sliver-moon shaped scuff in the paint.

“You’re all set,” he said, returning the tools to the garage. “Just remember us if you need any more work done.”

As I drove home, I thought about how sometimes it’s gratifying to be able to do the easy parts of your work—for a chef to make a grilled-cheese sandwich, for an electrical engineer to wire up an indicator light, for a mechanic to change a tire. For a web programmer to wire up an un-complicated little page.

I remembered the passage in Once A Runner where a high jumper, half loaded, is jumping over standards made of a broomstick and coat-racks into a pile of mattresses, finding once again the play in his event.

And it must seem like play, too, when the simple parts of your job let you perform tasks which seem monumental to normal people. Like removing a dent.

Now Playing: Good + Bad Times from Listen Like Thieves by INXS

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