Charlie Fhissler is a good person to know under any circumstances, he is especially good to know when your car is in trouble.

He is competent, capable and compassionate, not an easy blend to find in the modern world of business. Charlie works for the Rushinski Automotive Service. I hope he stays there forever.

In the Corporation Nation, where companies eagerly screw customers to keep shareholders happy,  I find fewer and fewer business entities that I can trust, they shower us with fees and then go and hide behind their customer service firewalls, where helpless cannon fodder try to calm and pacify the growing legions of outraged and aggrieved customers.

They do teach me how to stay calm and be patient, and that is a gift.

Apple is one company  I deal with that I still trust, they seem to care about me, and if they don’t really, they do a great job of faking it. They have never made me feel small, or stupid or insignificant. They have always been able to help, and quickly. In the computer age, that is worth a lot.

Charlie has the same manner and makes me feel the same way, and he is not a trillion-dollar company.

We became friends when I startled him by labeling Maria’s old Yarus a “toilet bowl on wheels.” He thought that was pretty funny. I hated that car and cursed it every time Maria sailed off in it in a raging blizzard without snow tires.

Maria, already eager to be her own boss and escape the judgments and opinions of men, was not especially interested in my pleas and rantings about the car in winter. She just ignored me. I’m still a little bitter about it.

I am especially vulnerable when it comes to cars. Charlie painstakingly tries to explain how a car and its engine work, but I think he knows it is hopeless. Even so, he has never given up on trying to educate me, once in a while he praises me for listening, he says. “see, you’re becoming a car person after all!” Charlie is a person of faith.

I get the car serviced every three thousand miles, have it undercoated every Spring, like he suggests,  and do every single other thing Charlie recommends. This is my idea of mechanics. This year, my car needed $2,000 in repairs to keep it in good shape, I was happy to pay it.

This week, I was once again grateful for Charlie.

My beloved Toyota SUV – now in its eighth year – is a partner in my life with Maria. We’ve driven it all over the country on book tours, our hit-and-run vacations, and through countless snow and ice storms. It is heading for 200,000 miles and running beautifully.

Until Sunday, and under the loving care of Charlie – I am just like the old men I knew when I was a kid, they might not remember their name, but they took great care of their cars – my car had never broken down.

It is comfortable, roomy and happy to absorb dogs and boxes and bags of clothes.

Sunday we were heading to the movies when there was a rattle and clanking noise, and the engine sounded funny and then there was an urgent flashing warning that the oil pressure was low and we should stop the car immediately.

We were out on a remote state highway, we might have been out there a long time, but we managed to get the car to a convenience store parking lot four or five miles away.

Maria and I are two of those people who are often rattled by small mishaps but stay very calm in the bigger ones. She starts cleaning the car to keep occupied, and I just tune out and get nervous.

I called AAA only to be told my membership has just expired even though my AAA card said it didn’t, and I had no idea it had.

This triggered long conversations and civil arguments with AAA and the end result was that we had to spent nearly $500 to re-up and pay special newcomer fees and charges and get the car back to Charlie, whose garage is a few miles from our farm. There was even a new customer “towing fee” of $4 a mile.

AAA just switched over to my “don’t trust” column.

After 24 minutes of dropped calls and painful discussions, a very polite supervisor named Edgard agreed to knock $15 – the new member fee – off of my bill. How generous of them, I have been an AAA member for more than 40 years, but I wasn’t in a great position to bargain.

When I got off the phone, I told Maria a mess this big had to be my fault.

I was anxious about my car, I had a panic attack that night.

I am not looking to buy another car now, or to add more thousands of dollars to the bills I already owe and am paying off. Knowing nothing about cars, I naturally expected the worst. And I love my car.

We got the car to Charlie’s garage at night, and I called him first thing the next morning. He had already read my note and told me he was pretty certain that some important hoses had deteriorated between “the filter housing and the engine oil cooler.” I, of course, had no idea what that was, but I trust Charlie completely – which is critical under those circumstances.

Charlie sounded calm, he was reassuring. He’d get to it as soon as he could – he is always busy – and there was nothing much to do but wait. Charlie is one of those strong silent types. He knows everything, says little, and makes no promises he can’t keep.

Later that day, he called and I asked him if I needed a new car.

Charlie has a dry sense of humor, “I think we can salvage it,” he said, causing my heart to jump a bit. I think it meant we would be fine.

He said he was ordering a new hose, it would arrive on Wednesday. I didn’t want to bother him but I drove by the garage in Maria’s car a few times, I saw my car up on Charlie’s lift, which was a good sign. I remember when Charlie called Maria after her annual inspection in the Toilet Bowl Yarus and said, well, she passed inspection but needed a new car, the bottom had rotted away.

I hate not having a car, I feel especially vulnerable and powerless. Besides, I have a lot of places to go, including Albany and the Bishop Maginn High School. Charlie called this afternoon and said the car was ready, no damage had been done. It took him hours.

It needed a new steel oil pipe, which cost $115.74. Labor was $205.53, parts $166.65. With tax, the repairs were $398.23.

It was odd that AAA, my longtime emergency rescue service that I paid for years to be there in an emergency, cost more than the very serious and major repairs to my car.  If I hadn’t had the right credit card, I’d still be sitting there.

All told, the adventure would end up being close to $1,000, most of it for AAA.

But you know what, and this is no BS, I am both lucky and grateful. Honest.

We could have been stranded for hours if the car had broken down completely, which it didn’t. We could have had our farmhouse wiped out in a snowstorm or hurricane. The car repairs could easily have cost several thousand dollars And I had my car back in two days.

Charlie says it can run for years.

But you know what the best part of this was for me? It was Charlie, the special experience of turning to somebody you know is both honest and skilled, and trusting him to do what needs to be done. For me, that really makes the difference.

It makes me feel really good just to know that he is there.

Knowing that there is not one penny or fee more than necessary, and trusting that the car is fully repaired and ready to take me out on the road again. I think that is worth more than anything.

In this world, we are often compelled – even against our nature – to ask “who do I trust?”

If Charlie is your mechanic, you don’t have to ask that.