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Communication Breakdown

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VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

While looking for an old photo of Esperanza Bonanza for a story for tomorrow’s Times e-edition, I came across one of my old columns that made me chuckle, and I thought since it had been six years since it ran, and it ran in the Marion Ledger rather than the Times, I would share it here. This originally ran in the May 2019 edition of the Marion Ledger…

Look, I’m sure that weird things happen to people all the time, but I swear my wife and I get more than our fair share of odd inconveniences. Many of them, I’ll admit, are self-inflicted.

Like the time my wife had a flat tire, and in the course of changing the tire, she locked her keys in the trunk. Or the time my son kept asking me if I wanted to watch a movie with him while I was working on something in the next room.

He rattled off about a dozen titles before coming across one I

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knew we did not own in our DVD collection. It was then that I realized he was scanning through the pay-per-view options, buying the movie (at about five bucks a clip), watching a minute or so, and then moving on to the next movie.

So, that sort of thing.

Well, a few weeks ago, it was spring break, and both of my college kids cam home for a visit. That part was fun. But at the end of the week, my wife and I took my daughter to beautiful, scenic Bowling Green, Kentucky, for a volleyball tournament. She plays for Metro West, and long-time Patriots sports fans would like likely know her coach, Diane Phillips. Well, it’s Diane DeRose these days, but she’s a great coach, the team had a great time, and Bowling Green is pretty cool. None of that was the problem.

The problem came Sunday morning when my oldest son called wanting to know if anyone had seen the keys to his Jeep. We have a little keyholder thingie hanging up by our door, and they were not there.

The only memory I had of even being in the Jeep that week was to move it because he was parked behind me one morning before work. After exhausting everywhere he knew to look, and after sending him on a scavenger hunt through every laundry basket, desk drawer and hidey-hole I could think of, the keys were still nowhere to be found.

I even checked all our stuff we had with us just to make sure we hadn’t somehow taken them to Kentucky.

When that proved fruitless, we decided he had two options… either wait for us to get home so we could help him look (which would not have been until around 8 o’clock that night, and still leave him with a five-plus hour drive back to Fayetteville… even if we were immediately able to find the keys), or he could take my car, which was still back home in Marion, back to college and we would swap up later.

He eventually went with Option B, and made his way back to his apartment, which he reached just about the time we got back to Marion. Of course, 30 seconds after getting home, I saw my Atlanta Braves hoodie hanging on the closet door. If you don’t know what comes next, you haven’t been paying attention to this story. Yep, they were right there in the pocket.

Oh well, right? These things (apparently happen). I let him know I had his keys and we made plans to do a car swap two weeks later when we were going to be in another volleyball tournament in Hot Springs. The drive between Hot Springs and Fayetteville is about three hours as opposed to the trip between Marion and Fayetteville, which is about 5 1/2 hours.

Still an inconvenience, but less of one—at least in theory. Well, the time came to head to Hot Springs. It was a Friday afternoon, and my wife, my daughter and I loaded up in the Jeep and headed west. We made plans to stop for dinner at Nick’s Bar-B-Q & Catfish in Carlisle. If you’ve never been there, I definitely recommend it. Only about five minutes outside of Carlisle, we started hearing a dinging noise.

“Check Gauges” the Jeep instructed us. So, we did, and you could see the battery life gauge slowly but surely creeping toward “0”… not good.

I have very limited mechanical knowledge, but I do know that zero battery is bad.

With no other options, we pressed forward toward Carlisle, and as we were pulling in to the Nick’s parking lot, systems began to fail.

The power steering went out, then the radio, followed by the air conditioning. And sure enough, after pulling into a spot, I turned the Jeep off and tried starting it again. All I got was a “click-click-click” noise. Which I proclaimed with false confidence to my wife must be a problem with the battery or the alternator.

So, we went inside to eat and contemplated our next move.

Priority one became getting my daughter to Hot Springs.

So, we launched a texting campaign, found a mom from another local volleyball team who was on the way through, and she volunteered to pick up my daughter and take her with them.

So, first problem solved.

Then it was a matter of finding someone who could diagnose and fix the problem with the Jeep… in the middle of nowhere, at 6 p.m., on a Friday night. It turns out that Carlisle is a bit of a truckers’ destination, and with truckers comes mechanics. In a stroke of good fortune, I found a guy who knew a guy who would have one of his guys out there in no time.

“He’s only got three teeth, but he knows his stuff,” I was assured.

Well, not long after that, the guy (and his three teeth) showed up and towed us to a spot at a nearby truck stop where he popped the hood and in mere minutes concluded that it was, in fact, the alternator.

He assured me it would be a quick fix, assuming he could get an alternator after hours on a Friday night.

He made a few phone calls and found one in North Little Rock and actually sent his girlfriend on a mission to retrieve it. This was all, again, a rare bit of good luck, as I envisioned being in a Carlisle motel (or rather, the only motel in Carlisle) overnight and scrambling to make it to Hot Springs in the morning.

Anyway, the trip to fetch the part and get it put on was going to take a while, so, as yet another parent from another local team was driving through, he volunteered to take my wife to where my daughter was so they could be together and my wife wouldn’t have to spend a few hours in a truck stop parking lot.

Just a fun bit of trivia, it was Chris Wilson, husband of the Marion Ledger’s very own “Marion Mom” Dorothy Wilson, so that’s pretty neat, right?

So, around 8 o’clock Chris and half his team collected my wife, leaving me there to await the repairs, which were completed around 9:30 p.m.

Four hundred (worth it) dollars later, I was back on the road.

I collected my wife and daughter and we made our hotel room around 11: 30 that night.

So, that was fun. But wait!

There’s more!

Saturday volleyball went well. No problems there. I made plans with my son to meet up Sunday morning at a town called Waldron, which we both agreed was about half-way between Hot Springs

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and Fayetteville. It would be about an hour-and-ahalf there and about an hour-and-a-half back.

Even if we grabbed lunch, it would give me plenty of time to get back in time for the first Sunday game at 3 p.m.

So, I dropped my wife and daughter off at church there in Hot Springs (we have friends there to give them a ride to the volleyball tournament after church), and headed up beautiful Highway 270 in the scenic Ouachita National Forest. The problem came when I realized I had no cell phone signal. Like as in none at all.

So, I winded my way through the woods and plains until I reached Waldron. I used the McDonald’s wi-fi to Facetime my son.

There was bad news on the other end.

You see, instead of putting Waldron in his GPS, he put Hot Springs. And instead of taking him through Waldron, he missed his first exit and it rerouted him a different route. After comparing notes, it basically put us both half-way, just in different routes. Let’s say Hot Springs is home plate, and Fayetteville is second base… well, at this point, I was on third base and he was on first base.

With no other option, we met up… halfway again, after going down back roads, dirt roads, farm roads, and eventually meeting up in a little town called Caulksville.

There was no lunch. There was just “here’s your keys, see you later.”

I won’t even get into how we got home that night to a muddy mess left by the dog on our new furniture…

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