The Gift of Restlessness by Casey Tygrett

Author:Casey Tygrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781506483573
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Published: 2022-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

CAN THINGS BE MENDED?

Forgive us . . . as we forgive . . .

Interstate 80 spreads like a great weathered finger across the entirety of the United States. From two lanes to as many as five in some places, the road presses on. Living on the northeast corner of Illinois and having family in northwestern Indiana, I know this path well. I-80 has become a fellow traveler for me, one with an attitude all its own.

On a particularly sunny fall Saturday morning, I made the trek across the state line to Indiana. The radio was on, but my mind was elsewhere. Along with commuters headed to South Bend to see the Fighting Irish, trucks heading to deliver their cargo at a safe (but efficient) rate of speed, I held the pace on the road while I was miles ahead in my mind.

I was headed to have a hard conversation with my dad. This is neither the place nor time to audit what was going on between us. But suffice it to say that the parent-child relationship often lands on strange and uncomfortable ground as the years go on.

We were set to meet at a travel oasis, something I hadn’t heard of before we moved to the Illinois-Indiana corridor. Part rest area, part mall food court, the oasis provides a place to make a pit stop and get a soft pretzel, all while suspended above the interstate.

We did not choose the location for the pretzels but for the convenient public space. I don’t think either of us expected this conversation to be quiet or nonconfrontational.

As I drove, my mind sifted through the previous discussions. The one with my wife, Holley, after our last hard conversation with my dad. We talked and planned for what needed to be said in this one. I felt a rising discomfort in my stomach, and that tension took my mind from the road and well into the future.

The conversation didn’t go well. I said some hard things, and I said some cruel, unnecessary things. Dad returned fire. The wheels came off the conversation, and despite our best efforts, we ended up speaking from a place where critical thinking is nowhere to be found. That is an anxious space—a grasping, needy space.

While I was driving to that meeting, however, I had gotten lost in my thoughts and almost missed an amazing sight. A car had pulled over, its hazard lights flashing. Even from a distance, the tilt of the car gave away the diagnosis: flat tire.

Flat tires aren’t uncommon. What is uncommon is that the person changing the tire was Hellboy. The character Hellboy first appeared in comic books in 1993. He is a large, red-skinned demon-man with a giant right hand made of stone and two horns protruding from his head, filed down into blunt circles.

And now you have the visual of what I witnessed that day. Here on the interstate was a grown man, dressed in cinema-grade costume and makeup, changing a tire. Something

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