It Could Be Worse

There is a new commercial for auto/life/home/personal protection insurance that shows a woman being rolled up into a pile of blankets and rolling on down the street, evading death at every turn and piling up more protection as she goes. The theme of the ad, as Bill Withers's yacht rock anthem "Lovely Day" darts across your ears, is that this insurance company will wrap you up in the blanket of their love and indemnification for a low, low monthly price, and what a fool we all are for not picking up the phone right this second to enroll.

Then there is another spot with people driving all around town with Jell-O molds and I don't know what-all else on top of their cars. The lesson there is, don't pile stuff up on top of the Studebaker and expect it to be there when you get to Martha's house, unless you're a very good driver, and if you are such a driver, you should be covered by (this) insurance company.

I don't care how many bags and boxes and pizzas and jackets I have to juggle. I have always made it a point not to use the roof of my vehicle as a staging area for items yet to be stored inside. This started when my junior high Spanish teacher piled a box of school papers on the roof of her aging Biscayne and motored homeward, decorating that stretch of York Rd known to longtime Towsonites as "Sandy Bottom" with tests and dialogues and maps of Spain.

Then came the time that a fairly new Assistant State's Attorney for Baltimore County piled all the files for the next day's docket at one of the District Court atop a car and buzzed away, leaving a snowfall of legal paperwork that probably even yet today is part of the mulch down by the Old Jail on the corner.

I bring all this up to make one point. We all do screwy things. I once got home, found a screw protruding from one of my tires, and foolishly removed it. I don't know what I was thinking, or even if I was thinking. Certainly I knew that even the best of 4-ply radial tires don't form scabs and heal themselves, but instead of driving to a service location, there I stood, looking up the number for AAA.

Things sometimes seem like the end of the world, but Spanish tests can be re-given and court documents can be reproduced and tires can get patched. When it seems like the whole world of gloom and doom is crashing down upon us, that's the time to remember the words of Linda Ellerbee.

Linda Ellerbee became a fine journalist on NBC and on a Nickelodeon news show for kids. In her early years of work, she was a copywriter for the Associated Press, and in those early days of word processing, she was using the work keyboard to write a letter to a friend. The letter contained some rather pithy observations she had made about coworkers. But when she went to hit "print," she hit "send," and so every broadcast outlet and newspaper and anyone else who subscribed to the Associated Press got to read her letter hot off their teletypewriter.

Panic set in, at first, until she came to realize that the worst that could happen was, she might be fired. "They can't kill me," she deduced, and in fact, they did neither of those things.

And someone important saw the letter and liked the way she wrote, and she was hired by a big station in Houston - and soon after that, Linda Ellerbee was on the air in New York at WCBS TV.

SO, what the heck! You mess up, you fess up, and things will work out. Sometimes, for the very much better!