News

Jan 06, 2024

Messenger: Flat tire offers me a chance to pass on critical dad knowledge. Sort of.

Flat tire Tony Messenger is the metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Flat tire

Tony Messenger is the metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

WILDWOOD — My daughter had a flat tire. This is an opportunity, I thought.

The youngest of my six children was about to have some fatherly knowledge rain down on her.

As my children have gotten older, these situations don't present themselves as often as they used to. Four of my kids are grown and three of them have children of their own to raise. One teenager is headed to college soon, and the other is pretty self-sufficient.

Until the flat tire, of course. She hit a curb. The tire went flat. She called Dad.

I know what some of you are thinking. It's 2023, don't we have roadside assistance? (Yes, we do.) But Old School Dad decided that it was time to teach his daughter how to change a flat tire. There was a time when you had to walk a mile or more to find a pay phone and get help with a flat tire. People needed to know how to do things.

In my daughter's case, sure, it was almost 10 p.m. And it was cold. But how often does a father these days have a captive audience?

So I drove to where my daughter was standing by her car. Luckily, I already knew where the spare and jack were. I had to locate them after we bought her the used car because the radio wouldn't work and there was a code kept, for some reason, by the spare tire. Radios didn't used to have codes. But I digress.

I started with a story.

"It could have been worse," I declared.

Then I recounted my first flat tire, when I was her age. I was driving home and couldn't navigate a curve near my house because I was going too fast. I was one of those less-than-responsible teenage drivers, unlike my daughter, who is a rule follower — or so I am led to believe. My car skidded into a raised curb by a drain, the tire popped and my car spun out of control onto a neighbor's lawn.

It was dark. I walked home to get a flashlight. My dad was there. "Need some help?" he asked.

No, I told him. Just had a flat tire. I got this.

My dad, perhaps much like me, sensed an opportunity. The Messenger men (most of us, anyway) are not what you would call the mechanical types. Somewhere in our ancestry, that gene skipped us. But we do like to tell stories and pass those stories on to our children. So my dad came along.

Half a block from my car, the flashing red and blue lights of a police car filled the night sky. The officer told my dad what I hadn't mention — I was speeding. The skid marks on the road gave me away. The officer helped me change the tire while Dad lectured.

Life lesson learned.

Story time was finished. I unpacked the spare tire and jack from my daughter's car. The jack was one of those tiny things with a folding crank that looks like it was designed to hold up a 10-speed bicycle, not a 2-ton vehicle. I pulled out the owner's manual and read while my daughter held the flashlight from her phone over my shoulder. I explained the locking nut and how you have to line up everything properly.

We cranked the car up into the air. Before I could remove the wheel with the flat tire ... well ... the car tilted forward and fell off the tiny little jack designed by engineers who I hope found another line of work.

"Let's try my jack," I decreed.

It seemed more stable. We lined it up again, started cranking and ... the car fell again.

We were on a bit of a hill. This wasn't ideal, I explained to my daughter in my best dad voice, but I didn't think the hill was that bad.

Still, better safe than sorry, I said. It was time to call roadside assistance.

These days, you don't even have to call. There's an app for that. The guy showed up about 45 minutes later and accomplished in five minutes what I couldn't get done in an hour.

"This is why you pay for car insurance," I explained to my daughter, proudly passing off a bit of dad knowledge.

It wasn't the lesson I hoped to impart that night, but, hey, at least the problem was solved, right?

As we dropped off the tire to be fixed, and I reminded my daughter to never change a tire on a hill, she seemed to absorb the information well.

"It could have been worse," she said.

Life lesson learned.

Drivers have been warned that they could risk serious engine damage if they fail to check their antifreeze levels during winter.

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Tony Messenger is the metro columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

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