Calls From One of My Brothers

I have numerous siblings from my blended family, but I only hear from one, my older brother “T”. I am respecting the right to privacy by my family and friends, so I’ll use pseudonyms when talking about them, unless they have departed, so “T” will be my big brother here.

This morning, T and I talked about anything and everything and somehow, we lit on the topic of windshield dings. I was reminded of the one that I received once while following a dump truck full of construction gravel and shared the incident with T this morning.

I was driving to work and as soon as it happened, I knew from the sound that I had received such a ding. Sure enough, I saw it there right smack in the middle of the driver’s side view, and a trip to the local glass repair shop had it looking new again. They drilled out the ding to round out and smooth the edges of the tiny divot, then filled it with some kind of see-through compound that they declared made it like new again. Cost was about $20, and they guaranteed the repair for the duration of my ownership of the car. Fast forward about two months and as I’m driving to work one day, the sun hit my windshield just right and I saw a minute fracture beginning to form from that little repaired ding. I called the glass place, and they scheduled a time to come by. When I pulled in, the owner himself came out to see what was going on and when I pointed it out to him, he told me that it was my imagination. He placed his thumb on the repaired spot on the inside of my windshield and said, “It’s solid or this should crack it.”

He put slight pressure on the spot and what happened next had him exclaiming, “Holy S***!!!!”

That little microfracture zipped lightning-fast on the whole length of the windshield, in multiple directions! The WHOLE WINDSHIELD CRACKED!

“Well, THAT wasn’t supposed to happen!” he noted before motioning me to follow him into the shop so he could order a new windshield for my car.

My big brother laughed and said I should write about it, so here it is, this Sunday morning’s snippet of one of our conversations.