Ah Have Always Depended Upon Tha Kindness Of Furries…

So Carlota and I are cruising down through West Virginia, on our way home, and we come around an off-ramp and pass a car broken down by the side of the road. Standing next to it is a long-haired young man looking tired and flustered.

I debated stopping, got about twenty feet down the road, felt a pang of guilt, and Carlota said, rather dreamily, “He was pretty cute.”

This was all the encouragement I needed to slam on the brakes and throw it in reverse. I pulled over, hopped out, and schlepped over to see if we could offer him a cel phone call or a lift to a garage or something.*

I got within a couple of yards…and saw the tail.

“Holy shit!” I said. “You’re from Anthrocon! So are we!”

A huge grin cracked his face. “No way!”

Seriously, what are the odds that the people who stop to help a pair of broken-down furries are a pair of…well, not precisely furries per se, but at least adjuncts to the fandom?

Alas, their alternator was busted. Carlota can fix a lot of car related ailments with spit and duct tape, but not that one. The back of our car was too jammed to fit more than one, and there were two of ’em. We offered either one a ride in to North Carolina, but since one had Triple-A and the other one owned the car, they were both stuck for the duration. I spotted ’em twenty bucks for dinner–can’t leave a member of my favorite subculture to starve to death in West Virginia–and we wished them luck and continued on our way.

“Poor kids,” I said, cruising past Summersville.

“Yeah…”

“Hope they make it home okay.”

“Yeah.”

“Wish there was something we could have done.”

Carlota grinned. “Yeah….but hey, we did both get hugged by a cute guy.”

“A cute furry guy.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

My life gets weirder the longer I live it.

*Note for my mother: No, I would never do this if I was alone in the car. Stop freaking out.

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