My wife and I share a car… a 1997 Honda Passport with nearly 100k miles on it. I take it to work every day, and any errands that need to be done, she takes the car later that night. It's a necessary, although not very convenient arrangement.

One night last December, my wife shook me awake from a very deep sleep and told me that she had hit a pothole, blown out a tire, and driven home on the rim. I muttered a routine obscenity and looked at the clock…. 10:30 PM. I found myself muttering more routine obscenities as I pulled myself awake. I did the math in my sleep-groggled brain and decided that there was no way I could go back to sleep and change the tire in the morning before I went to work. Work was 63 miles away, which meant that I had to get up at 3:30 to be there at 6AM, which was in itself a real chore. I also decided to do it that night because I am, as many of you know, The SpecialEd Mechanic, and something ALWAYS goes wrong, no matter how simple the task is.

I got out of bed and did what I always do when I am forced to do a task that I really don't want to do: Curse, curse, and when I'm done cursing, I curse some more.

So now I'm dressed and ready to go outside and change the tire. Easy enough, I tell myself, forgetting for a brief moment that I am the SpecialEd Mechanic, and something ALWAYS goes wrong. I step outside and discovered that not only had it started to rain, but the temperature had dropped into the teens. Great. I go inside to get my coat, a brand new leather jacket given to me by my parents a few months back. I hated to wear it to change a tire, but I had no choice, seeing that I'm not very fond of hypothermia.

Perhaps I should give you a little back story at this point, and tell you about our driveway. Well, we don't have one. We live on top of what is basically a big pile of mud with a rutted, rain-washed ditch that serves as a way to get the car closer to house, but no driveway. When it rains, the "driveway" erodes even further and becomes a large mud slide, ending in a large mud bog at the bottom.

My wife wisely elected not to attempt the "driveway" with a flat, so she parked at the bottom, in the mud bog. Still cursing, I head down to the car with my flashlight and fish all the necessary tools out of the back and remove the spare from the rear carrier. This was quite a feat because I did it all with almost no light other than the flashlight… we live on a dark country road, and all the lights in and on the house didn't reach down into the mud bog. Luckily, I only dropped the jack on my foot once.

I hear a noise behind me and turn around to find my nine year-old son, Isaac standing there all bundled up. It seems that every time I attempt to do something mechanical in nature he always shows up to see what help he can offer. However, I often tell myself that he shows up so he can laugh at me, because Isaac, like his grandfather, has a natural mechanical aptitude. If he learns anything from his dumbass father, it's the WRONG way to do something, which is just as valuable as seeing it done the right way. But there he was, outside in the cold and wet with me instead of staying warm and dry in front of the TV inside.

"You want me to hold the flashlight for you, Daddy?" Suddenly, I'm not as cold as I was before. I smile to myself in the darkness and say:

"No, what I want you to do is change this damn tire for me so that I can go inside and scratch my feet while I watch the Tonight Show." He laughs, then comes and takes the flashlight from me and aims it at the tire.

"You're gonna need something to put the jack on so it won't sink into the mud." He says. Duh! How could I have forgotten? And he's right. I run up to the house and fetch two pieces of 2x6 from the porch that I had stashed there for just such an occasion. Hey, even the SpecialEd Mechanic can do something right and think ahead every once in a while.

I stick the two pieces of wood under the car, position the jack, and begin the laborious process of lifting the car. I have a special jack that lifts the car about one quarter inch for every 100 turns. Sigh… it's gonna be a long night. When the car is off the ground enough, I break the lug nuts free using several hundred thousands pounds of pressure and even more curse words for each nut. Isaac is now openly laughing so hard that the flashlight beam is jumping all over the place. By the time all of the lug nuts are free, I am drenched in sweat as well as rainwater, yet I'm also shivering from the cold, and my cheeks are burning. Can anyone say influenza?

I jacked the car up a little more, finish with the bolts, and remove the tire. Ta-dah!!! The SpecialEd Mechanic has just successfully removed a whole tire without a major incident! Now just grab the spare, mount that puppy on the spindle and we are DONE. There we go, it went right on…. NOW WAIT A [edit] [edit]ed MINUTE! It won't fit….son of a…..

"Daddy, the old tire was flat, which means that the spare is gonna be a lot taller." Said Isaac. Once again, DUH! He didn't need to point out that I should jack the car up further. I figured that one out on my own. So, a few thousand more turns on the ol' jack, and we should be in business. There! The jack is up as far as it will go, so here goes….. WHAT THE [edit]?!?

To my horror, I noticed that the 2x6s had sunk about a half inch into the mud, AND the flat tire had been concealing a very large flat rock that was about one inch high. The jack wouldn't go any higher and the spare would not fit with the rock in the way. I dug my fingers in around the edges of the rock and pulled. Nothing. It wouldn't budge. I got down on my knees for more leverage and pulled again. Still nothing, and now my knees were covered in cold wet mud, and the freezing water was leaching through to my skin. I cursed the rock some, hoping it would help loosen it. Nothing.

Then I had a sudden burst of inspiration: Break the rock with a hammer! Of course! I had Isaac run up to the house and fetch me a hammer. When he returned, he was holding something behind his back. Grinning, he handed me a rubber mallet, immensely pleased with himself. "Just kidding!" he said, and then handed me a claw hammer. Ha ha very funny, ha ha it is to laugh. I was lucky I noticed the rubber mallet, because I would have surely swung at the rock with it and it would have rebounded back in my face.

I took the hammer and went to work on the rock, coupling my vicious swings with even more vicious profanity. Each swing knocked off a piece of rock about the size of a watermelon seed and made pretty sparks. After the first 500 blows or so, I realized that I was going to have to sit down because my knees and back were killing me. I plopped down on my rear and the freezing mud immediately penetrated my pants and flash-froze everything below the waist. (Insert any joke you want here, I've heard them all already.) However, sitting down gave me an even better angle on the rock and it split in two after a few more blows. Hooray! Now I can get off my frozen patookus and put the tire back on! THE [edit] [edit]ED ROCK STILL WON'T COME OUT!!!! I pulled on the rock for another five minutes using manly-sounding grunts and cursing through my clenched teeth. Finally, out of sheer desperation, I grabbed the hammer and attacked the rock with more ferocity than ever, delivering a machine gun staccato of pings and sparks.

Isaac was doubled over, laughing his butt off over my ridiculous performance, unable to keep the flashlight trained on the job at hand. In the wavering flashlight beam, I saw that the first 2x6 was almost completely submerged. [edit]!!!! [edit]!!!! [edit]!!!! Now the tire will never go on and this damn car will still be sitting here on this jack at 3:30 tomorrow morning. I was already planning what I was going to say to my boss when I called him and explained why I wouldn't be in: "Hey Dennis… this is Steve. I won’t be in today because I'm a [edit]ing idiot."

"Hey daddy?" Isaac said. "Why don't you put the hammer claw under the rock and pull?" Preposterous!!! That would never work! That rock has to be the tip of a mountaintop in China. But yet I found myself trying it. With an obscene sucking sound, the rock, which was the size of a small dog, magically came out of the ground. In an extremely juvenile moment, I showed the rock my middle finger, and struck it one more time with the hammer. I was rewarded with a flying rock chip to the eye.

However, the mud had completely claimed the first block and was already working on the other one with astonishing speed. That tire was never going to fit under the wheel well. Then it hit me… where once there was a rock, there was now a hole. Ha! My second keen observation of the night! And Isaac didn't have to say a thing! I rolled the spare over and wedged it into the hole, and wouldn't you know it? The lugs lined up, allowing me to put the nuts back on, which was not easy because all of my extremities were frozen. I cleaned up my tools, took the car off the jack and observed a moment of silence for the 2x6 that so bravely gave of itself, only to be claimed by the Alabama mud.

And then it was done. And it was good. And I saw that it was good. And I did grin happily.

The SpecialEd Mechanic always triumphs!

…eventually.