I suppose that a noisy pulley on a 2000 right hand drive Jeep Cherokee is my version of the old frog in the bucket of water story.

You know the one where the frog that’s dropped into a bucket of boiling water will jump out, but the frog that’s dropped into the cool bucket that’s gradually heated to boiling temperature will swim until he cooks to death?

I’ve never tried that.  I don’t want to kill a frog.

It may be that any frog would hop out when it starts to get uncomfortable…and that the bucket story is just a good illustration.

I don’t really know.

I guess the point of the story is that the things that we get used to that happen gradually are a lot more dangerous than the sudden shock.  We can live with the things that come around little by little…we can grow used to the harmful situations that creep into our lives.

I got the Jeep back after waiting for a week for the correct part to come in to fix it.

The old air conditioning compressor had a bad bearing….and it finally started to drag and squeal and grind so much that I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

When the pulley started to “wobble”, I knew that it was time to act….quickly.

“Irritating” finally crossed over into “potentially debilitating”, so I had to do something.

When I got it back after the repair, the Jeep ran quieter than it ever has.

It almost felt like I was driving a Prius.

I almost wanted to try and start it again.

It ran smoothly.

My car ran smooth.

It was grinding a little when I bought the Jeep.

It was grinding a lot when I fixed the Jeep a couple of years later.

Until I got it fixed, though, I didn’t know how quiet it was supposed to be.

I didn’t know what “right” was.

Of course, “right” is relative.

If you come from a Norwegian household, it might be “right” to sit down to a special meal of lefse and lutefisk.

If you’re not Norwegian, it might be the “wrongest” meal you ever ate.

You might think that it was kind of a strange menu if you weren’t Norwegian.

Now, there are some things that are just “right”.  We know somehow that there are things that we could run into that damage us.

That’s not so tough to arrive at that conclusion, really.

But, like Paul Simon said in one of his songs, sometimes “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor”.

Sometimes a different perspective has a big bearing on what “right” is for a person.

That Jeep, though…that Jeep that was so noisy and such a “faith walk” to drive…that Jeep that fell under the “turn the radio up louder” rule, where a strange new (or old?) noise could be ignored a little longer by listening to some Bob Marley loud , that Jeep is quiet now.

That Jeep runs smooth.

Who knew that “closer to right” could be so pleasant?

Who knew that “smooth” could be so right?