"Let Me Tell You A Story" Thursday
...the tire and the apartment
A deep thank you to all who have indulged me and this Substack experiment. Everything is still free here! So…
I’m one of those people who has never cared much for the expression “everything happens for reason.” Let me tell you a story.
Cincinnati, the final stop on my graduate-school journey, was a great place to live. My apartment sat in a cute section of town called Hyde Park, inhabited almost exclusively by residents that me and a good friend called “the beautiful people.” Put another way, as poor graduate students we—rightly or wrongly—labeled ourselves as grubby outsiders.
My drive to campus was a pretty straight shot, down what would become Martin Luther King Boulevard. On the way, you drove through another little burb of taverns and storefronts called O’Bryonville, the setting for our story and where the following sequence of Newtonian events occurred, events I still think about quite a bit.
So, I’m driving in my problem of a car, probably listening to Oasis’s “Wonderwall,” when a woman pulled even with me on the left and began to pass me. Her car moved funny. I can’t describe it—maybe I experienced an Einsteinian moment in the Newtonian universe I mentioned, because her car appeared to be waving. You know, like actually made of the heatwaves we often see rising from tarred roads.
Then she passed me and I discovered the reason why. Her front left tire was wobbling, a lot. And fast. Fast enough that you could see it in two places at once, like the spinning machinery of a fancy time traveler in a science fiction film.
This did not look good, so I decided to slow down drastically (something I never do), much to the consternation of the driver behind me. As I slowed and turned my head to scowl at the fresh beeping from behind, I saw an elderly homeless man sitting on the pavement, leaning against a thin tree. I had never seen a homeless person in this part of town.
Then it happened. The woman’s tire flew off her car. This is the least interesting part of the story.
The street, two lanes each way, ran through a small shopping district with crosswalks, and it was lunchtime busy—people driving places and neighbors strolling on the sidewalks. Now the physics of what happened next.
First, the tire flew to the left, toward the oncoming traffic. Yet, its flight, perfectly parabolic, formed a neat rainbow, over both streams of oncoming traffic. To this day, I don’t believe any of the drivers saw the unidentified flying rubber donut.
But, in clearing the cars, we enter phase two: the plentiful pedestrians on the sidewalk including—and I’m not kidding even though it sounds like a movie—a woman with a stroller. This tire was flying fast and furious. Any contact with a human body would prove significantly destructive.
Instead… after the rainbow arc over the cars, the tire strikes the curb with incredible force. Again, perfectly. And up it goes, over the heads of every pedestrian below. This all happened in about 1.5 seconds since the tire disconnected from its original home. I don’t think any of the sidewalkers truly saw it. Maybe one or two. But no one stopped. No one ducked. Everyone just kept walking in the sun.
But the tire, having cleared the pedestrians, was heading above the sidewalk toward the two-story brick-front buildings that lined the avenue. Again, in a perfect upward arc. If not for the impending contact with the building, the tire would fly its second perfect rainbow of the day. What would happen when the tire hit the building? Would it fall to the sidewalk and onto the heads of people below? Would it bounce into the road and strike a car? Land on a windshield? Or would it return to its owner, then stuck in the road with her smoking front-left rotor dug into the street?
No, none of these. Like a coin into a slot, the tire crashed perfectly through a second-story apartment window—all the glass neatly moving inward—and disappeared behind white curtains. If the tire had been tilted even a little to the left or right, it would have struck the window frame and bounced back.
Me, in my car and in what was then stopped traffic, simply said, “Holy stromboli! Did you see that?” No one was with me. I was talking to myself.
The woman who lost her tire stood outside her car, joined by four or five bystanders. They looked around, heads moving side to side, up and down, searching for the tire. It had disappeared. No one could locate it. Pedestrians on the sidewalk began to pause, not only wondering why a car in traffic was missing a tire, but why people standing at the car looked around bewildered, like they had all dropped and lost something.
And there, outside my passenger window: the homeless man. Now on his feet, he pointed upward at the window and his mouth was as wide open as possible; I could have pitched a softball into it, like into a milk can at the County Fair. No sound emerged. He just pointed, mouth open in amazement. To this day I believe we are the only two people who tracked the runaway tire’s journey.
Traffic started to move, and I drove to campus. But for the rest of the day an unfinished story ran through my head. The apartment. What about the person or people who lived there?
I imagined someone coming home and, inexplicably, a tire sits in the middle of the living room, just lying there like a new round table. How could that be explained? Is this a joke? Revenge? Why is there glass on the floor? Was the landlord doing some work? With a tire?
I’ve also imagined two occupants, maybe a couple, laying something across the tire and then sitting down to eat dinner, accepting its presence in their home.
The image at the top of this page is the best I could come up with for this sequence of events that happened for no reason beyond a world filled with loose lug nuts, literal and metaphoric.
Thanks for listening. Have a wonderful day.