Yep, today I was on the way to play the harp and sing for a wedding ceremony at the Mother Cabrini Shrine church on Fort Washington Avenue in NYC, and I got a flat tire! This is actually the first time in all my years of playing the harp that I’ve had a flat tire on the way to an event. Fortunately, I always leave ridiculously early for everything, so to ease your fears, dear reader, let me say that I was still all set up and ready to play at exactly the appointed time (half an hour before the start of the ceremony) in spite of an hour-and-a-half of unexpected delay.
Also, today was the big NYC snowstorm, appropriately enough on the first day of spring, so I was also dealing with all this in the snow, slush and ice! Quite an exciting day.
I had two really nice guys try to help me replace the tire, but the jack would not turn — one of the guys was a big, tall redheaded Irishman, and he told me in his brogue, “I weigh 230 pounds, and this is not turnin’ for me, so there’s no way it would have turned for you.” He put his whole weight into it and nothing! So I called AAA, and they came to fix it. Everyone was so nice at the church, it really made it so much easier to have such a support network.
Here are some photos so you can see the tire when I got there — it blew out while I was still on FDR Drive, but I knew I couldn’t stop until I got there, no matter what, because I could not miss the ceremony! So I rode that tire til it was in shreds, in fact til most of the tire was competely gone – you can see the actual rim in the photos —
