The beauty of metaphors is that they can literally symbolize anything you want them to. The stages of a rose in bloom can signify the steps of a relationship. Shakespeare once called the world a stage, where everyone was a player, and each had their exits and entrances. From the simplicity of the rising sun representing a heart in love, to the complexity of dying being a wild night and a new road (Emily Dickinson), a metaphor is a philosophy.
There is beauty, light, and happiness in life, but there is also pain, suffering and cases of bad luck and those are the things we like to forget. But why look at misfortunes as just that? Why not materialize those experiences into something wonderful? Perhaps the best way to move on from a setback is to build a forward path for it to travel and lead to something worth discovering. It may be dry and hard to conjure, or it could be as easy as making a metaphor from a flat tire.
Since the day my parents got married and went on their first road trip together, they have encountered a flat tire. The consecutive bad luck trickled down and affected the road trips my siblings and I went on with our parents. My mom’s precise memory could chronologically tell you every single flat tire we had and which exact trip we were on when they happened. I remember most of these encounters, but the one that sticks with me as being the most dramatic and prevalent flat tire is from when we were on our annual spring road trip to California.
It was April of 2014, and I had flown back home to Colorado, so that we could go on our road trip to the west coast. We had just spent a night in Flagstaff, Arizona, and were approaching the town Kingsman when it happened. My brother was driving. I was in the back with my sister and mom, my dad in the front seat, when all of a sudden there was a ginormous pop sound. My mom, being the timid, overdramatic person she is screamed and tired to grasp the roof of the car. My sister and I just sat there while my dad was directing my brother to remain calm. My brother took the lead and for some reason knew what to do. He slowly coasted to a stop, not slamming on the brakes and keeping the wheel straight, as he pulled off to the side of the highway. We got out of the car and realized the tire had completely blown out. There were pieces all over the highway and the wheel was nothing more than a rusted rim. After this, every following road trip was interrupted by a flat tire.
My family and I participate in RAGBRAI (Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa) whenever we can. It takes place in July, and if we are available that month during the summer, then we hook our bikes to the top of our suburban and drive nine hours to the border of Iowa. We’ve only been able to do this trip as a family twice, though my dad has ridden in over five RAGBRAIs, his first being the 10th RAGBRAI in 1982 after he graduated from high school. Our first trip out to Iowa, we got a flat and the second time, we got a flat again. It was an endless cycle, even our four hour trips to the mountains in the summer came with a price. A price for a new wheel.
My parents came to visit me this past September, and we got a flat on the Long Island Expressway. That was an experience. We were driving back from White Plains after visiting my aunt and uncle and it was really late at night. My mom was driving and we were about 20 minutes from my school when we got the flat. We pulled off to the side of the highway just to be stopped by a highway guy with an orange vest as his only sign of identification. He told us that we weren’t allowed to change the tire, that he had to do it. It seemed suspicious, but we weren’t in the mood to argue with this New York native, so he went to the trunk only to discover that the rental car service had not included a spare tire. My parents were outraged and the highway guy was baffled. We didn’t have any choice, but to drive to the nearest exit and call the rental car people. We did this and waited for four hours in a Dunkin Donuts’ parking lot, even though the service said we’d only have to wait for two. It was around one in the morning when someone finally showed up with another car for us to take. Given our wait time and unethical lack of resources, I didn’t go to class the next morning.
My parents were just in town last week visiting me on their spring break and we were talking about all our bad luck with flat tires. Ironically, my parents didn't get a flat this time when they were out here. How they managed to drive to five different states and not get a flat is beyond me. But through our reminiscing, we concluded that our experiences weren’t as bad as they were when they actually happened. We metaphorically related these flat tires as “rough spots” in all of our individual lives.
At the time of the flat tire in Arizona, I was living in Harlem with two terrible roommates and I was battling a lot on my own. My mom and dad were standing up for their jobs against a tea-party school board for two summers in a row, lining up with our RAGBRAI trips, and recently my brother has had to make a decision on whether he was going to stay in school in New York or move back home. If we had gotten a flat this past trip when my parents were here, I would have drawn a correlation with my sister’s apartment experience she’s going through right now in California. But the absence of one gives me the idea that my sister is just luckier than the rest of us.
Needless to say, life is full of unexpected occurrences, but there’s always a way to fix or push past them. Anyone is my family would argue that these tough times have shaped and guided us in a direction that put us somewhere better than where we were before. There’s not always going to be a spare, but with patience and understanding, a silver lining will be revealed. Life would be boring if there weren’t patches which presented a tough stitch to repair, and nothing safe is worth the drive. So the next time you experience something bad or taboo, just think of how everything is lesson within its own flaws. If it ever gets too difficult to unravel, just think of how easy it is to make a metaphor out of a flat tire.
