“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”

― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

It had already been a long day. My family and I had been to the county fair, an event we attend each summer that is always fun and predictably comical. It’s also exhausting, and the four hours we spend there each year is more than enough to tide us over for the next 12 months.

By the time we left, we had all sweated through our clothes and were each in various stages of a respective sugar crash. The kids were tired and grouchy, and my wife and I wanted nothing more than to leave. The A/C of the car was a welcomed reprieve from the July heat and we all shared in a collective desperation to get back home.

Five miles down the road, along interstate 65, I heard a noise. My wife heard it too. It was a clanging sound echoing from the engine as if something was flopping around loose underneath the hood. As I turned onto the next exit ramp, I felt that the power steering was gone as well, and I had to crank the car onto the shoulder. There was a small amount of smoke emanating from the engine and we quickly pulled the kids from the car and walked to the shade of a small tree.

It was a confusing sequence of events. My first thought was to check the engine, but that wasn’t going to help. The car was broken. That much was obvious. The more pressing matter was my family camped on the side of the interstate. We needed a tow truck and they needed a ride. Fortunately, my father-in-law was home and would be able to retrieve my wife and the kids. I also called a tow truck dispatch who gave me an ETA of 90 minutes.

Once we’d handled the logistics, I was able to breathe and process the situation. This fucking sucked. It sucked in a big way. We were hot and tired and now we were sitting on the side of I-65 with several more hours of headache ahead of us. The car had been worked on the day before and I could only suspect the shop had screwed something up. I wanted to scream and yell and bitch because I just didn’t want this to be happening. But it was, and no amount of complaining was going to change that.

Approximately an hour and a half later, I was riding in a tow truck back to the same repair shop I’d been at the day before. By now I’d had plenty of time to think about the day’s events. I thought of how obnoxious and annoying this was and I lamented what had happened to my Saturday afternoon. Yet, each time I thought of a new gripe, I returned to the same conclusion: it could have been worse.

We were stranded on the side of the interstate with a broken car and irritable kids, but it could have been worse. In fact, it could have been a lot worse. It was really hot outside, but it could have been cold. Or, it could have been raining. This could have happened 100 miles from our house instead of 15. My father-in-law had gotten there within 30 minutes, but it easily could have been an hour. It was Saturday afternoon, but it could have been Monday morning, or night time. Actually, any other time in my week would have been less convenient than this was. We didn’t have any plans and we had nowhere to be. After all, this could have happened on the way to a meeting, or on our way to the airport, or, god forbid, on the way to the hospital.

The situation had sucked. There was no doubt about that. But it could have sucked a lot worse. There’s no telling how much worse it could have sucked. Shit is going to happen. That’s inevitable. Your boat is going to get rocked. So when it does, rather than bitching, just weather the storm and think of it as nothing more than a life tax. Sooner or later, everyone has to pay. Your bill could always have been higher. Just be grateful it wasn’t.