Monday, November 18, 2019
A friend of mine who worked for Broadwing (a fiber optic cabling company) had a tire blowout while she was on the road a few years back. It was Sunday and she needed to be somewhere else, but she wasn't going anywhere until her car was fixed. She had taken a room at the only motel in the little town she was in and called me to pass the time since there was nothing else to do there. She remembered me mentioning that I had grown up in Kansas and wanted commiserate with me on how flat and boring Kansas was. I asked her where she was. She said "Leoti"
I told her to hang on, and I made a call to my uncle Frank. Uncle Frank was Dad's best friend, and owned the gas station directly across the street from my Dad's (Grandad's before him) filling station in Leoti. Between them they owned the only two fueling spots in the entire county when I lived there. While I hadn't spoken to Frank in several years, I knew he would remember me. Sure enough, we dropped right back into old times, and as soon as I mentioned my friend's problems, he said not to worry about it.
My friend called me in amazement a few minutes later. "How did you do that? Every place in town is closed, I checked." Two guys showed up with a tow truck, took the car down the road to the service station, and got it back on the road in a few hours. This happened on a Sunday in rural Kansas, where nothing gets done on Sunday. I just called an old friend, I said. Someone I really should have talked to more frequently. https://ranthonysteele.com/2006/11/home-is-where-the-heart-is/
