I am dating myself when I say that I remember my mother dropping me off at grade school and then getting in line for rationed gas. The line stretched all the way back to the school, which was about seven or eight blocks from the station, and it wasn’t even open yet. Twelve years later though, when I began to drive my own car, there was some sort of (faux) glut and gas prices dropped from over a dollar a gallon to about sixty-nine cents! No one seems to remember this except me and the reason I know it’s true is because I wouldn’t have been able to afford to drive a car if it hadn’t happened. As it was, I always put the cheapest gas in my little ten-year-old-pieced-together-with-duct-tape Toyota Celica, and I never had more than ten bucks to put in it.

I was in college then and I only worked weekends (that was when college seemed expensive, but was actually like shopping at the Dollar Store now), so my paycheck was pitiful. Every Friday I would fill up the tank and it would have to last me until the next Friday. My sophomore year, my grandparents took a trip to Nepal (they survived it too, even though my grandfather’s favorite thing to tell us before he left was that if they died, we wouldn’t be getting their bodies back) and they asked me to live in their house for six weeks. That was a no-brainer! A big house all to myself, my birthday coming up while they were gone, tons of friends! Sign me up. What I didn’t figure into the equation was that they lived a lot further from school than my parents did. That meant, on a fateful Thursday night, after a late movie, I was calling my dad from a payphone to tell him…yep…I’d run out of gas.

Time: Midnight.

“Uh, Dad?”

“What?”

“My car ran out of gas.”

“All life suffers.”

“Dad?”

“Borrow a gas can.”

“They won’t let me.”

BIG SIGH. “Where’re you at?”

I told him. He arrived with a gas can and a lecture. He also told me something I never forgot. If you run out of gas and you let the car sit for about fifteen minutes, it will probably start and get you to a gas station if you’re close to one. This information should’ve come in mighty handy yesterday, but we couldn’t wait.

Unlike those college days, my husband and I can afford gas. Well, as much as the next person anyway. I mean, we do have to sell things off periodically to pay for it…CDs, books, small appliances… We however live in our own little world and don’t always pay attention to the everyday mundane tasks like filling the tank. The first time my husband ran out of gas in our truck he told me it was because the dash lights weren’t working and so he didn’t notice the gauge had dropped. Yesterday, however was bright, sunny, about ninety degrees and it was the middle of the day. We’d run a bunch of errands and were heading for home.

As we started up one of the country hills on the way to our house, the engine started making a funny noise.

“Oh, no!” my husband said.

“What?”

“We’re out of gas.”

I had distinct visions of the engine dying and us rolling back down the hill and into a field. I do think that my husband might’ve handled it better than that if the engine had actually died, but as a writer I find it’s useful to imagine the worst case scenario.

We leaned forward in our seats, edging the truck onwards. After chugging up the last hill in second gear, and rolling down the next one in neutral, we puttered to a stop. We live out in the middle of nowhere, but by sheer luck, there is a gas station about an eighth of a mile from our house. Unfortunately, we were about an eighth of a mile and a hundred feet from our house when we ran out, with the gas pumps in full view.

We were not really in a position to try Dad’s words of wisdom though and wait fifteen minutes because there was no shoulder of the road and there was a lot of traffic. When one driver stopped and asked what was wrong and we said we’d run out of gas, she looked back at the pump and cracked up. Then she drove on. Always happy to provide amusement, we just smiled and waved.

We live in the south though so we weren’t actually too worried. We knew it was only a matter of time before a couple of guys showed up in a battered F150 with a tow rope to pull us those last few feet, so we decided to push while we waited. As it turned out, before they could materialize, a friend of ours pulled up behind us and pushed our truck with hers. You gotta love the south.

By the way, did you know that air conditioning decreases your MPG by about one mile per gallon? Yeah…if only we’d had those windows rolled down while we ran our errands.