by Sam Payne
I was running some morning errands the other day in my little grey truck. The truck is a 1992 Toyota pickup that with a little help from its friends is still running, 244,000 miles after it rolled off the factory floor. The help it needs from its friends includes a quart or two of oil every six weeks or so. I’ve taken to picking up a couple of quarts sometimes when I stop for gas, and on this lovely morning, right at the edge of cool in a desert that doesn’t often see it, I had the hood up in the driveway, just to check things out. Unscrewed the oil cap, and then reached far down into the engine to pull the dipstick. The ritual lasted just a moment, and then, with plenty of oil, I put the hood down and was on my way.
But sometime after my first errand, the truck idled awkwardly to a stop at the edge of the parking lot as I pulled haltingly across it. That would have been a terrible, mysterious development, except that I knew exactly what had caused it. I knew because I’d done the same thing a month before, with no less embarrassment. I pulled off to the curb that bordered the parking lot, opened the hood, and there, beneath a fresh coat of newly spattered oil, was the cap to the oil tank, resting innocently right where I’d left it when I unscrewed it in my driveway; just an inch or so North of the opening it generally covered. Chuckling at myself, I reached in to put the cap back on.
That’s when it happened. A single, tiny drop of black oil fell silently from the underside of the truck’s hood, and with the most unassuming, faint “pat” landed on the sleeve of my dress shirt, just above the cuff. The drop stood roundly on the fabric; I didn’t know what to do. The idea of wiping the shirt clean seemed to invite all sorts of complications. And the drop was so small. So I shrugged, closed the hood, climbed back into the truck, and got on with my errands.
By my next stop, the tiny drop had grown to the size of a dime. The fresh oil was spreading down and out across the surface of the fabric. By the third errand, it was the size of a quarter and growing. Flecks of oil that I hadn’t even seen with my naked eye at the scene of the accident had grown. I had oil all over my shirt cuff. A little family of virulent oil stains was thriving there; growing together like a family ought.
I didn’t have time to go home and change the shirt before work; so I wore it, and endured the oil stains until I got home in the afternoon, where of course I had to show them to my wife. It was a new shirt, and my dear wife responded to my carelessness with her loving eyes rolling and her kind head shaking. Short of enduring the story of how the big oil stains on the cuff had come about, she relieved me of the shirt, and set herself to work.
The shirt hangs back in my closet now. Still subtly stained with motor oil. So subtly, to my wife’s credit, that you might see me in town and I might be wearing that shirt and you won’t know it. But there it is—that discolored patch above the cuff.
It’ll probably always be there. There like the countless other things that I let into my life, knowing full well that in large quantities they’ll destroy me; knowing that, but also somehow believing that in small quantities they won’t even interrupt my errands. Won’t interrupt my errands, that is, until I look down and find them growing like cancer through me. Oh, the wisdom of taking care of tiny oil stains quickly and completely, lest they spread on up my shirtsleeves and over my neck and up into my brain and poison and kill me. If I ever forget that principle, I need not look any further than my closet. I’ve got a shirtsleeve in there that longs, albeit subtly, to remind me.
