Did I ever tell you about that time?

A couple of months ago I participated in our neighborhood garage sale. It's always motivating to have a reason to clean out every nook and cranny of your house.

Cash. Cold, hard cash.

Most of you know my profits from the sale went to buy a new cell phone since someone decided mine was part of the "free" bin on one of the tables.

The tables. Oh, those tables.

Randy arranged for me to borrow them from our church and arranged to borrow Jeff's truck to pick them up and drop them off.

Just drop them off.

He sweetly loaded them up along with any leftover items from my garage sale so I could run them back to the church, but first I made a pit stop by the senior center to donate my remaining items. He did offer to take them for me, but was still at the dentist with Ryde getting their teeth cleaned.

Dentist or drop something off? Um, anything that does not have dentist in it, thank you.

After unloading the extra things, oh wait, did I mention it was a sweltering day and Jeff's air conditioning was broken? OK, sorry, back to the story. It was hot, very hot and as I pulled out of the senior center, I mapped the fastest route to the church and headed west. I came to an intersection and sat at a red light waiting to make a left turn. The light turned green and I slowly started my was through when I heard what sounded like a crash and what felt like the truck falling apart followed by cars honking. In the rear view mirror I caught sight of three folding tables in the middle of the street.

Blocking traffic.

At the soonest possible place I turned around and headed back to assess the situation. Yep, there they were, preventing any other vehicles from making the left turn I just made. Nice. I pulled into the driveway of a house that was on the same street and hopped out of the truck while calling Randy over and over again on my phone. Apparently he was still in the midst of dental work and never heard his phone. As I stepped out into the street, readying myself to pull these heavy tables out of the way, I wondered how in the world I was going to get them back up in the truck.

Eye contact.

That was all it took. One person, a man rather, who was coming up to the light made eye contact with me. With a helpless look on my face I ran up to his open car window (his ac must have been broken too) and asked him if he could help me lift the tables out of the road and into the bed of the truck. He hesitated for a second, looking around for the candid camera crew and quickly realized this girl needed assistance. Together we lifted the tables through stopped traffic while a city police car drove by without even slowing down (thanks a lot!). With sweat running down my flushed face I thanked him for being my angel and we both went on our way.

Well, kind of.

I made it two blocks to a big parking lot where I re-secured the ratchet straps over the tables to make sure I wouldn't cause another traffic jam on the way home. Driving as slowly as legally possible, I made it safely back to our driveway where I left the tables for Randy to return.

Next time, I'll stick with the dentist.