Media Release

ON THE ROAD: GIRL POWER
Daddy don't know jack

JAN WONG
May 3, 2007

To preserve the last shreds of his dignity, let's call him "the Dad." Last Saturday, his son was having a birthday party - something that involved driving considerable distances to pay money to walk across wires strung between trees. The Dad was carpooling three 11-year-old girls, none his own.

"We were driving along when we heard, zzzz, zzzz," says Beatrice Hodgkins, who has blue eyes, freckles and a honey-blond ponytail.

Kate Thomas-McNeill looked out the window. "There's this guy waving frantically. He was completely spazzy," says Kate, who weighs 60 pounds and is also a blue-eyed blond.

She informed the Dad, who, thinking he was too slow, shifted lanes. Oddly, unlike the typical, irate Greater Toronto Area driver, the other guy kept jabbing his finger down, not up.

At which point, the Dad clued in as to why his teal-blue Toyota Camry had been bobbling along, making odd, thumping noises. A rear tire was flat.

Happily, they were across from a Canadian Tire outlet with lavish auto-repair facilities near Barrie, Ont. Unhappily, the wait was 45 minutes.

 Now, the Dad had never changed a tire in his life. The girls surmised this because he began shouting into his cell.

"Lots of bad words. All in a jumble," Kate says. "He was really tense."

The Dad called his wife, another dad and the Canadian Automobile Association, which estimated the wait at, yes, 45 minutes.

Meanwhile, the three girls waited in the car. What were they thinking?

"We all think: 'We can change a tire,' " they say in unison. They have been in the same class, with the same teacher - Barbara Eriksson, or Ms. E - since Grade 1 at the Toronto Waldorf School. It's a private school where everyone takes carpentry, learns to knit and be observant. All three had watched someone else change tires before.

"It's pretty self-explanatory," says Corrinna Jacob Groves.

"We were saying, 'Should we tell him we know how to do it?' " Kate recalls.

The three fifth graders decided to give the Dad a few moments to calm down. Then they got out of the car.

"The first thing we told him to do was put on his parking brake," says Beatrice, an accomplished violinist. "We were on a slope."

"He said, 'Yeah, OK, I was going to,' " recalls Kate, a hip-hop dancer.

Corrinna explained gently, "You put the jack under the car."

"He said, 'I know, I know. I just don't want to put a hole in my gas tank,' " Beatrice says. She raises an eyebrow. "The gas tank wasn't anywhere close."

As the girls jacked up the car, the Dad tried to be helpful. He helped them lift the spare tire from the trunk. He loosened the lug nuts. He also suggested that they lay them on the ground in sequence just in case, you never know, they wouldn't work in any other order.

When they were done, the Dad began to relax. He told them they should have made an amusing little video in front of Canadian Tire. "Like, you didn't help us, so we had to use child labour," Kate recalls.

Now the Dad had to cancel the SOS. For this, he again required female assistance. His hands were grimy from lifting the tires, so Beatrice followed him into Canadian Tire, holding aloft his Bluetooth cellphone so he could talk while he washed his hands.

When they finally arrived at the birthday party, no one made a fuss. "Everyone was in trees, so there wasn't much time to be talking about flat tires," Beatrice says.

"It's a tire," Kate says.