Wheels still turning over the lives of absent hubcaps

Last week’s column centered upon a hubcap missing from my wife’s Toyota. She claimed no knowledge of the circumstances of the item’s loss but stepped right up in working to correct the problem by scavenging up a random wheel cover from the side of the road, hoping it was somehow her own. It was not, and I carried the cap back to the spot where she’d found it to set things straight with the universe by leaning the orphaned plastic ornament against a downtown light pole.

In addition to keeping a lookout along the roadsides while traveling on my bicycle, I also made a habit of diverting my ride home from work specifically to check in on our “downtown” hubcap. Weeks passed, and the hoop never budged, even though thousands of cars a day pass its post. Then one day it was gone — poof, vanished into the ether just like that.

My imagination swirled with possibilities, the first and most hopeful was that the owner, a traveling salesperson of some sort, had finally made it back through town on his month-long circuit, discovered his missing hoop at the side of the road and had driven away as the most happy and fulfilled Prius driver this side of the Rocky Mountains.

The more likely scenario was some kid picked it up and schlepped the thing a half mile down the railroad tracks, banging against every wall, fence post and cottonwood sapling along his path before sending it off into the weeds like a giant, silver Frisbee. Either way the hubcap was gone.

During this time, of course, Kristin was driving about the world one hoop short, and although I’d promised to order a replacement, I had yet to act, mostly out of the stingy delusion I might still find the one she’d lost. Furthermore, although I hadn’t found her particular hubcap, I had — at bicycle speed — spotted no fewer than a half-dozen wayward, random wheel covers crouching among the roadside weeds and ditches in the course of my travels.

Then one day a full three months after Kristin’s cap had taken leave, another ring appeared in nearly the same spot she had found her mistaken replacement and I had later offered it back to the universe in the name of good karma. I pulled my bicycle off the road, grabbed up the genuine Toyota hoop and rode directly toward home to check for a fit.

Along the way I worked to conjure up a backstory that could logically explain the hubcap’s three-month absence. The best I could come up with was a sci-fi riff where the hubcap had been mistaken for some form of earthly treasure and had been spirited away by space aliens for close-up study, then gently returned to the very spot it had been found — all of this to justify keeping the hubcap of some other unfortunate loser.

All my creative conjure was for naught, however, as not only had I once again carted home a hubcap that did not fit, but also discovered somehow, somewhere Kristin’s car had come up missing a second hubcap on the same side of the car.

While some men may see this as further defeat, to me it was a gift as I recalled a sage maxim once delivered to me by a used-car salesperson: “True, the hubcaps on the left don’t match the ones on the right, but no one sees two sides of a car at the same time.”

I consider my problem solved. (We’ll see if Kristin feels the same!)

Kristin and John Lorson would love to hear from you. Write Drawing Laughter, P.O. Box 170, Fredericksburg, OH 44627, or email John atjlorson@alonovus.com.