Ruth, Bradleys quiet little mother who had driven up from the Cities just for my birthday, put her hand on my arm and said, Mr Ostrowski, January of 1989, were you working the night of the ice storm on Highway 61.
I was. I remember it. Thirty below, black ice, a car in the ditch with the headlights still on. A young mother and two small children, the car filling with cold, the engine dead. I pulled them out, got all three into the warm cab of my tow truck, and drove them to the hospital in Duluth myself because the ambulances were all stuck.
I never knew their names. You do not, in that work. You pull families out of ditches on Highway 61 at two in the morning and you go to the next call.
Ruth was the young mother. Bradley, my son-in-law, was one of the two small children in the back seat.
Bradley said somebody has got to clean up the wrecks. The man who cleaned up the wreck on Highway 61 in 1989 is the reason he grew up to become a dentist and mock a tow truck driver at an Olive Garden.
Ruth had been staring at me all through dinner, trying to place my face, and when my daughter Jen quietly told her what I did for a living and how long, it came back to her all at once. The tow truck man who saved her children.
She told the table, with tears running down, that she had spent thirty-six years wondering who the man was, the one who appeared out of the storm and carried her babies to safety and would not even take her thanks.
Bradley set down his breadstick. He could not speak. The man he called a junk hauler had carried him out of a freezing car when he was four years old.
I drove a tow truck in Duluth for thirty-eight winters. Somebody has got to clean up the wrecks, Bradley said. Somebody also has to pull the children out alive. Ruth remembered which one I was. Bradley will never forget it now.