Yesterday afternoon I parked the car and discovered I only had a nickel in my change purse. And so I cried an ugly cry.

That ugly cry began germinating about a month ago, when I realized I wasn’t going to have enough hotel loyalty points to cover even one night at the Type-A Parent Conference, much less the two nights I’d been expecting. So then I had to call my roommate to break the news to her that no, I wasn’t going to be able to cover the room after all.

I felt stupid, and I was worried about how I was going to come up with the money to pay my half of the bill.

Yesterday afternoon my roommate called to say she’s going to stay with a local friend rather than staying at the hotel. I don’t begrudge her that decision at all, since she’d also been counting on the room being free, but that left me three short days to find someone with whom to share the room and the cost.

I put the word out on the conference Facebook page, but I didn’t have high hopes. What I had instead was a lot of anxiety and heaps of guilt regardless of whether I decided to:

spend a large chunk of money on two nights in a hotel when there are other, more important places it could go;

or

cancel my reservation, stay home and leave the volunteer coordinators — who already have me on their schedule in several spots — in a lurch.

I tried to put it out of my mind at least for the day after I made the Facebook group post. The kids had been asking for a few days to go to the big splash pad thing downtown, so I put them in their swimsuits and off we went.

Which brings us back to the nickel and the ugly cry. I had a nickel, I cried and I scrounged around in the console and found a few more coins. It would be enough, I reasoned, for them to spend at least a few minutes splashing around. So I took a minute to compose myself and went to feed the meter.

The meter still had 30 minutes on it. I added my few coins, and the kids had 45 minutes to play.

We gathered our things, crossed a few streets and walked down the park to the splash pad. The weather was clear and hot yesterday, and there were people sitting around under the trees and sunning themselves on the lawn. Among them was a dude with a guitar. You can find a dude with a guitar pretty much anywhere in our town, so that wasn’t unusual at all. But this guitar guy, he looked right at us as we walked by.

“Every little thing,” he sang directly at me, “is gonna be alright.”

I tried to believe him as I spent the next 40 or so minutes watching my kids and dozens of other kids run and leap and laugh and shine in the sun.

And then I spent most of last night worrying. I always struggle to believe that every little thing is gonna be alright. When I get to the Ugly Cry stage of worry, I move very quickly from my normal Glass Half-Empty pessimism to full-out The Glass Is Shattered On The Floor And Nothing Will Every Be Right Again panic. So I worried and fretted like it was my job, and then this morning I posted again on Facebook that I was looking for a roommate. A little while later I emailed the conference’s volunteer coordinator to tell her I might have to cancel.

Thirty seconds after that? I had a message on Facebook from someone looking for a roommate.

Sometimes His mysterious ways employ parking meters and troubadours and cheerful children. I hope someday I can get far enough beyond myself to appreciate that in the moment.