Two broken windows, with a side of redneck please

Sometimes you try and do a good thing and you just end up getting pooped on. Last weekend, as RL and I were wrapping up the Relay for Life we helped plan, we had a little accident with a light stand and a generator. We were hauling the thing back to the rental place—whose drivers had all worked too much that week, and couldn’t drive the extra two miles to pick up this unwieldy piece of equipment—when the hitch came undone. Hearing the thing dragging on the ground, RL hit the brakes and all of the sudden the boom was in our backseat.

Now, I don’t love this car. It’s a 17-year-old Blazer, and about every single luxury feature the car ever had has managed to stop working (and by “luxury” I mean air conditioning, defrost, and the ability to tell which gear you’re in while driving). So with a crunched back gate, now windowless, the first words out of my mouth are, “at least now we’ll have better air flow.” Seriously, the car is on its last legs, and that’s why neither of us was terribly upset over the accident.

But without any plans to replace the car in the next few weeks, RL decided to head on over to the junkyard and see if he could just grab a few parts and replace the back end himself. $125 later, he’s got a new back gate and a new window. Though I’ve never actually done any auto body work, I agree to watch/help as he installs the stuff.

So all is going fairly, strangely, well—we get on the gate without any major problems, and move onto the glass. Only a few more bolts through the window and we’re set. So here I am holding the underside of the glass as RL is tightening the window onto the car, when all of the sudden the glass shatters, about two inches from each of our faces. Amazingly both of us survive without much more than some tiny scratches and a few straggling bits of glass (and in RL’s case, those straggling bits all got trapped in his forest of arm hair. It's quite impressive). Once we realize that we’re okay, we start to laugh about the inevitability of something going wrong in every project that we do.

But we never could have predicted how this project was going to turn out.

The next day RL heads back to the junkyard. Of course he has to hang his head a little in telling these guys that yes, he needed another window because the last one didn’t quite work out. By the time he arrives at the yard they’ve pulled out just the window for him. I think they felt sorry for him, so they helped him put it on, obscene sticker and all.



I’ve amended the photo, but you get the idea. RL has since removed the sticker in embarassment, but I knew we had to have some way of remembering that, for at least a few days, he was a redneck.