Monday night I’m driving down the road and suddenly my transmission just goes out.

I pull over (thankfully, I was on a back road) and put it in park, waited a second, put it back in drive, and off we go. I think, “Whew. Far out. Don’t know what that was, but glad it’s over.” About half a mile down the road it does it again. The usual sequence of “car trouble” thoughts and emotions begins to run, like this: “What the…?! O no. Doggone it” (this is the G version). Long deep sigh. Try a simple solution. That doesn’t work. Deeper sigh. Battle sweeping resignation, that whole “Why does life have to be so hard?” thing. Finally, I land on, “What am I going to do now?”

What made the trouble move from hassle to crisis was, I was...