Somewhere near South Dakota

"Goddamnit," I mutter to myself as my beloved F150 starts to make the guttural sounds of a dying moose. This is not my quality world picture. It is getting dark and I am in the middle of nowhere in either South Dakota or Wyoming or Montana or some other flyover state that I have no real desire to be in. I don't mean to sound like a pretentious and crotchety old woman from the Northeast. I have a real appreciation for the high plains of the interior west. I usually find the sameness comforting and even beautiful. However, it is getting dark and my truck is breaking down as we speak and I would really rather be somewhere with a population over 500.
Fortunately luck is on my side. Just as I am about to accept the fact that I will probably have to sleep in my tuck and call Triple A in the morning, I see the flickering lights of a town up ahead. And as if God had planned it himself, the neon lights of a mechanic's shop come into focus. I step out of the truck as it sputters to a stop and see a burly man in a wife beater, a tired looking black woman, a middle aged white man with a motorcycle, and a ten year old boy who I assume to be his son. I walk up to this motley crew and ask the man in the wife beater if he can help me with my truck. He nods curtly, tells the man that he thinks he has a couple of spare tappets, and then follows me out to the parking lot.
As he makes his way around the truck and starts to inspect various mechanisms that I am painfully ignorant of I wander back towards the cluttered shop. I hear the man fiddling with his motorcycle and muttering to his kid or himself about someone named Phaedrus and the classical beauty of the motorcycle structure. I cock my head to the side as I try to understand his ramblings, but the more I try to think about what he's saying the more confused I feel.
I give up and turn to the woman who is on the phone with someone named Iris. I hear her recount her journey from the American Indian Reservation that's been all over the news recently and her ill fated run-in with a pile of lumber on the highway after she had already used her spare tire. I smile as I eavesdrop. I haven't said a word to either of these people and I don't even know their names, but there is something supremely comforting in escaping your own reality and spending a moment residing in someone else's.