Memorial Day 2021

First, a shout out for Teach ... Happy Birthday!!

Now let me tell you what happened on Memorial Day. 

Curly's first game was scheduled for 1:00 and it was a "win or go home" tournament. He was excited to play this team from California until we saw the size of some of these kids. Their pitcher wore a bandana mask the entire time (after the game we heard that it was to cover his facial hair!) These kids are 12! But no one checks birth certificates from the out-of-state teams...

It is what it is. The boys played an awesome game! Sadly, they lost, 3-4.

Fortunately, that left us with several hours to visit Grandma and some of the cemeteries we love to go to on Memorial Day. First stop was Mt. Pleasant, then Spring City, Ephraim, Axtell, Centerfield... we got to almost all of them. 

The freeway was packed according to our GPS, so we decided to take the less-travelled road from Gunnison through Levan to Nephi. We were about 10 miles outside of Nephi when we got the notification that our right tire was losing air. Less than a minute later, we pulled over and the tire was totally flat. It was nearly dusk and we were losing light quickly. Time was of the essence.

If you remember, my car is fairly new to us and we have never had the opportunity to even verify that the jack, tools and spare were where they are supposed to be. We started by unloading all of the chairs, the wagon, the baseball bag; everything went onto the side of the road. It took us almost half an hour to get the jack out of the tiny space under the speaker. Even the book didn't explain it well enough to help us pull it out. 

Dark was crowding in as my sweetie and Curly were setting the jack. This was Curly's first time at changing a tire and he was still in his mostly white baseball uniform. That's when a kind stranger pulled in behind us. He was a mechanic with a garage in Levan and he had tools in his car that helped us get the old tire off. 

That's when we discovered that our spare was flat. Fortunately, our new friend had a tiny air compressor in his car that he used to get the tire to 50 lbs pressure. Then he gave us the air compressor and suggested we finish filling the tire to 60 lbs in Nephi. The air compressor had a built-in tire gauge so we could get it right.

Our new friend refused money and only asked that we pay it forward although I did manage to slip a folded bill into his pocket when his hands were full of tools. He was a great blessing for us, so hopefully a little money will also be a blessing for his little family. 

We took a few minutes to thank the Lord for tender mercies and begged for safety on the way home. We could only go 50 on the spare, so instead of a little over an hour, it took us nearly 3 hours on the back roads. We rolled onto the driveway about 1:15 AM, but our hearts were full of gratitude.

Memorial Day 2021 will be one that we will definitely never forget.