You'd think by my age—and my children's ages—I'd have left potty training in the dirt ages ago and I wouldn't be close enough to senility to be concerned about my supply of Depends yet, but somehow I've found myself having the potty conversation a lot lately. Maybe the early senility part is that I'm usually having it with myself, but I've done so much of that in my lifetime that I don't think much about it.
I think the reason this came up a few weeks ago was that the university finally replaced the toilet paper holders in the ladies room outside my office. I remember when I was a little kid and Mother lectured me on the amount of toilet paper I used; somewhere down the road I decided that must have been a Baptist mantra at some time because my college roommate's mother had used it on her, too. My mom probably did it because we were as dirt poor as the indigents the Baptist missionaries were trying to reach; my roomie's family never seemed to be in those dire straits. But the rule both of us heard was three squares per visit, and I was amazed by the neighbor down the street who would reel off yards of the stuff every time she went.
I was pretty sure the university had the same rule because the paper holders worked so horribly as to make me give up after battling for a few inches of tissue lest I not finish my day's work in a day's time. Ultimately, the top roll seemed to be permanently wedged over the bottom one so that neither one would turn. (And for a while there, the custodians were prohibited from replacing a roll until it was completely gone, which got to be a real challenge late in the day when the custodians had been long gone.)
Then one day I reached for the end of the roll and it whirled out almost completely across the stall as if it had been loosed by a teenager on Halloween. I recovered, gathered it up enough to finish my business, and laughed on my way to the sink.
Where I had another surprise: the new tissue holders had come in tandem with new soap dispensers, too. They weren't what any self-respecting designer would refer to as a matched set, so I have no idea why they both seemed to come together, but I'd long since grown tired of having to close the top section that held the soap pouch every time I bumped the bottom to release a stream of liquid.
I reached over to bump the release, but nothing happened. I had to examine it for a second before I realized that it was automatic, which meant all I had to do was to hold my hand under it briefly to get a lovely little mound of foam on my palm. I continued to paper the stall and jab at the soap dispenser for the rest of the week before I got the hang of using either one of them.
So then I went to New Orleans for a conference in a lovely convention center that had automagic faucets. I think the idea of automagic faucets is wonderful except that (a) they all seem to have different mechanisms to trip them and (b) I can't ever figure out what the right action is to get the one I'm facing started. I'm sure they save water for the places that have them, but I can work up a good level of frustration standing in front of a sink and striking a series of inane poses in search of the right way to hold my hands to get the water to come on.
And in the sinks at our favorite movie theater, the water is often so hot as to worry me that it's going to burn some little kid's hands, although I guess that's dependent on whether the kid can get it started. (I suppose that if kids have the same knack for automagic water faucets that they have for operating other electronic devices, they probably never miss a beat and the water starts for them first time, every time.) But if they can't get the water started or can't hold their hands in it, how healthy is that for the rest of us?
And then we have towel dispensers. I've survived the old cloth roll dispensers and dozens of iterations of the folded brown towels, so I've had some towel dispenser experience. But when I first visited the school where my daughter works a few years ago, I had recently been on an overseas flight and had spent an inordinate amount of time in various facilities that had automagic towel dispensers. You guessed it: every one different, and every one a guessing game about which pantomime to perform to get the towels to appear.
At the convention I attended in New Orleans, the custodial staff on the first day had carefully dispensed from each dispenser in the restrooms a length of toweling that just suited my needs, so all I had to do was tear them off and not worry about how to make the things work. But these were the good old, familiar dispensers like we had back home at school, so I followed what I understand is protocol in Asia and left the dispensers the way I found them.
The idea really makes good sense to me: wash your hands, tear off the length of towel on the dispenser, then use the towel in your hand to dispense enough for the next customer. No wet hands on the dispenser lever, and a towel in hand to dispense for the next user. In fact, I've been known to campaign for a wastebasket near the restroom door so I can open the door with the towel still in my hand and toss the towel on the other side.
So when I got through washing my hands at my daughter's school, I walked over to the sleek, streamlined towel dispenser and started my usual gyrations in front of it: hands held still beneath it, hands still in front of it, hands waving across the front, down the front, up the sides.... Oh. There on the side. The left and the right might look different because the trim on the right is a release lever. A couple of quick pushes (okay, three or four to find the right spot) and I had plenty of toweling for what I needed.
I had been in an another series of airports before my trip back last weekend, and this time I found yet another kind of towel dispenser. No handy pull tab, no indication of a trip light; instead, just pull gently and voilá—there they are! If it's that easy to get a towel, why did I spend all that time practicing charades?
By now I was beginning to think I must surely be approaching Alzheimer's faster than I thought when I read my niece's blog, wherein she related the story of an associate who habitually lets sneezes fly across the office but then carefully lines the toilet seat with tissue lest she contract someone else's germs. So it isn't just me that has this weird bathroom issue....
But then that brings up the case of the airport toilet with the automatic seat liner dispenser. That's a lovely idea and I appreciate the concern for my personal well-being, but could they please tell me how to make the liner stop circling the seat and just flush the thing? This one was not an automatic flusher or it would surely not have had residual tissue still in the bowl, but I must have dispensed four yards of seat liner before I figured out how to flush it myself.
My daughter isn't any help, either. She's in the process of breaking in a new roommate, which includes not only teaching him to put the leftovers in the Tupperware for storage but also washing his hands after using the potty. I don't know where she gets the idea this can happen—I raised her with two brothers who seem not to understand why the bathroom has a sink, in spite of my efforts to educate them—but she seems determined. She really likes this guy, so she's trying to be gracious about it, but she really does believe washing hands prevents the spread of germs."I've heard all the arguments about how they don't touch anything in there," she acknowledges. "I just don't buy it."
I might; it could explain a lot of why the ladies room downstairs at our house is substantially cleaner between scrubbings than the men's room upstairs. But either he's willing the seat up and down mysteriously or he's touching it with his hands or—ew—his feet, and either way, I'm pretty sure something in there calls for a hand washing.
I'm going to wish her a lot of luck with that, but it's an argument I don't want to join. I figure if I ever share a house with a person who doesn't want to wash, I'm going to assign bathrooms and stay out of the one that isn't mine. I don't want to hear about it.
Meanwhile, I'm off to another adventure, and I know I'll have to use an unfamiliar potty somewhere. Just give me strength to make the system work!
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Monday, October 19, 2009
Making the most of a Monday
Second Son took a job at a local pizza joint a few weeks ago, so we haven't seen him around the house much except when he sails through and drops off leftovers from the pizza kitchen on his way upstairs to play online video games with his buddies. Since he's got cash in his pockets, he gets to go out and play on the weekends, and he's out late enough that I'm usually sacked out by the time he gets in.
I've mostly been pleasantly surprised that the regular addition of pizza to my diet (if "regular" means most weeknights) hasn't caused me to balloon to the weight I was carrying around when that one was born—suffice it to say, substantially more than I should have weighed even if he had been twins. In fact, between making a point of playing fetch with the dogs a couple of times a day and Number One Son cooking generally nutritious food for me when the pizza runs out, I've actually managed to keep my weight close to where I think it ought to be, which is around 22 on the body mass index.
Since NOS has been out of work for a month and depression was beginning to set in (the good news for today is that he reports to a new job tomorrow), I've found myself missing my visits with SS, who is probably the most like me of my three kids. Besides sharing a lot of my political views, he also enjoys a level of gentle teasing that I enjoy but NOS considers rude; I guess a lot of it depends on perspective, although I have to admit the crowd I tease that way is pretty small.
Saturday night was an exception. My sister from Irving was in town, and the sister who lives here had invited us to join her and her husband to an evening of a home-cooked meal and "Guys and Dolls" at the local little theater. I enjoyed the show and would surely have enjoyed visiting my sisters more afterward, but the to-do list has been out of control for some time, and I wanted to knock off a couple of items before bed so I could start farther down the list Sunday morning.
One of those to-do items was connecting SS's laptop to our wireless printer, a project that we had never accomplished with our previous wireless router and that had been perplexing to me with my own laptop earlier in the week; but since I had conquered mine, I felt confident that I could conquer his, too.
Not so much; the task took a good deal longer than I had expected, so that a little time on the next item down the list put me awake well past midnight. NOS had some issue I needed to resolve before tucking in for the night, so I was still awake when SS came in from his evening out with friends. He drifted into my room and chatted randomly about everything from the new boots that weren't breaking in to suit him to the friends who are on their way to additional schooling in distant places to his struggles with learning to be a man while growing up in a house with estrogen to spare between his sister and me.
Somewhere in that last batch of information, he looked squarely at me and said, "You know, you've made it pretty hard on me to find women."
I could see how that fit the notion of too much estrogen around here; I don't know how to be a man, and I sure never figured out how to teach my sons to be. We had discussed the fact that he had made lots of good attempts to find good male role models, and I think he had done pretty well. He had tried out for football and made the middle school "starter" team; he had taken band to try to develop a relationship of sorts with his dad, who had been in band through his tour with the Marines; he had immersed himself in our church and developed a warm relationship with his male teachers; he had ultimately gotten into high school wrestling, where he found a sport where he could log some wins and had a coach he adored. So while I had certainly not been the influence he needed, I thought he had done a respectable job of finding role models who had much to teach him.
While he acknowledged that the lack of a father had made his life difficult, that wasn't the problem that remains. Instead, it was the fact that I've kept an eye on my weight, and except for my pregnancy with his sister, I have never reached a BMI over about 23 or 24, depending on how tall I claim to be. Either way, keeping my weight under 140 hasn't been a huge challenge, but it's been my stop-and-reconsider mark for years.
Turns out, SS is having a hard time finding women who weigh less than I do, and that irritates him. "They'll tell me they're 5-ft-3 and weight 140 pounds, and I have to tell them my mom is 5-ft-5 or -6 and weighs less than that. They don't have any excuses." It wasn't much of a compliment, but this was SS; I thought that was pretty major.
I crashed a little later than that, and Sunday I had a long list still before me, so while I let his words roll around in the back of my head, I pretty much kept said head down and went to work checking items off the list, not thinking much about the conversation of the night before.
This morning when I got ready to dress for work, though, I pulled out a pair of skinny-leg jeans I like and a long-sleeve t-shirt to keep back the light chill of an early fall day. Since the jeans are longer than I usually wear, I slipped on a pair of sandals that elevate my height almost another 3 inches but are still amazingly comfortable for standing and walking—a requirement on Monday when I have to teach two classes.
Something about the cool weather, the skinny jeans and shirt, the nice but comfortable shoes, and SS's comment that women his age have to look as good as his mom to make him happy put me in an unusually good mood for a Monday.
It's nice to get unsolicited compliments from your son!
I've mostly been pleasantly surprised that the regular addition of pizza to my diet (if "regular" means most weeknights) hasn't caused me to balloon to the weight I was carrying around when that one was born—suffice it to say, substantially more than I should have weighed even if he had been twins. In fact, between making a point of playing fetch with the dogs a couple of times a day and Number One Son cooking generally nutritious food for me when the pizza runs out, I've actually managed to keep my weight close to where I think it ought to be, which is around 22 on the body mass index.
Since NOS has been out of work for a month and depression was beginning to set in (the good news for today is that he reports to a new job tomorrow), I've found myself missing my visits with SS, who is probably the most like me of my three kids. Besides sharing a lot of my political views, he also enjoys a level of gentle teasing that I enjoy but NOS considers rude; I guess a lot of it depends on perspective, although I have to admit the crowd I tease that way is pretty small.
Saturday night was an exception. My sister from Irving was in town, and the sister who lives here had invited us to join her and her husband to an evening of a home-cooked meal and "Guys and Dolls" at the local little theater. I enjoyed the show and would surely have enjoyed visiting my sisters more afterward, but the to-do list has been out of control for some time, and I wanted to knock off a couple of items before bed so I could start farther down the list Sunday morning.
One of those to-do items was connecting SS's laptop to our wireless printer, a project that we had never accomplished with our previous wireless router and that had been perplexing to me with my own laptop earlier in the week; but since I had conquered mine, I felt confident that I could conquer his, too.
Not so much; the task took a good deal longer than I had expected, so that a little time on the next item down the list put me awake well past midnight. NOS had some issue I needed to resolve before tucking in for the night, so I was still awake when SS came in from his evening out with friends. He drifted into my room and chatted randomly about everything from the new boots that weren't breaking in to suit him to the friends who are on their way to additional schooling in distant places to his struggles with learning to be a man while growing up in a house with estrogen to spare between his sister and me.
Somewhere in that last batch of information, he looked squarely at me and said, "You know, you've made it pretty hard on me to find women."
I could see how that fit the notion of too much estrogen around here; I don't know how to be a man, and I sure never figured out how to teach my sons to be. We had discussed the fact that he had made lots of good attempts to find good male role models, and I think he had done pretty well. He had tried out for football and made the middle school "starter" team; he had taken band to try to develop a relationship of sorts with his dad, who had been in band through his tour with the Marines; he had immersed himself in our church and developed a warm relationship with his male teachers; he had ultimately gotten into high school wrestling, where he found a sport where he could log some wins and had a coach he adored. So while I had certainly not been the influence he needed, I thought he had done a respectable job of finding role models who had much to teach him.
While he acknowledged that the lack of a father had made his life difficult, that wasn't the problem that remains. Instead, it was the fact that I've kept an eye on my weight, and except for my pregnancy with his sister, I have never reached a BMI over about 23 or 24, depending on how tall I claim to be. Either way, keeping my weight under 140 hasn't been a huge challenge, but it's been my stop-and-reconsider mark for years.
Turns out, SS is having a hard time finding women who weigh less than I do, and that irritates him. "They'll tell me they're 5-ft-3 and weight 140 pounds, and I have to tell them my mom is 5-ft-5 or -6 and weighs less than that. They don't have any excuses." It wasn't much of a compliment, but this was SS; I thought that was pretty major.
I crashed a little later than that, and Sunday I had a long list still before me, so while I let his words roll around in the back of my head, I pretty much kept said head down and went to work checking items off the list, not thinking much about the conversation of the night before.
This morning when I got ready to dress for work, though, I pulled out a pair of skinny-leg jeans I like and a long-sleeve t-shirt to keep back the light chill of an early fall day. Since the jeans are longer than I usually wear, I slipped on a pair of sandals that elevate my height almost another 3 inches but are still amazingly comfortable for standing and walking—a requirement on Monday when I have to teach two classes.
Something about the cool weather, the skinny jeans and shirt, the nice but comfortable shoes, and SS's comment that women his age have to look as good as his mom to make him happy put me in an unusually good mood for a Monday.
It's nice to get unsolicited compliments from your son!
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Happy anniversary, Mom and Dad
Today would have been Mother and Daddy's 70th wedding anniversary. Daddy died more than 38 years ago, and Mother has been gone for 17, but I always stop to remember them on this day. Whatever else ever happens on 14 October in my life, its significance will always be Mother and Daddy's anniversary.
This one started out a bit ironically. The dogs set up a fuss when someone rang our doorbell (Parker sets up a fuss if a doorbell rings on tv), so I rounded them up, pushed Sherman out back, and answered it. The man outside said his name was Gary and he was selling meat out of the back of a pickup truck.
I have no idea why I suckered in to a door-to-door meat salesman (I may be advertising my complication in a stolen-meat scam, or we could die of tainted-meat disease), but I did, provided he let me wake up the chief cook around here, Number One Son—who shares the dude's first name.
I had to rattle NOS out of bed to get him to talk to the guy, and he decided that the meat looked tasty, so I decided to buy. Hey, times are hard, I've been lucky, and the meat really did look tasty. Besides, it was sort of ironic that this guy had the same name as NOS.
Which got weirder. After we decided on the sale, I pulled out my checkbook to pay the dude and needed to remember the date. I never know what day it is in the morning; I sort of keep up with days of the week at the office, but my life is so automated I almost don't recognize the day of the month even there. But 14 October is Mother and Daddy's anniversary, and I was writing a check to a man who had the same name as my son.
Only not quite. The dude asked me to make out the check to Gary Frank. I said, "You're kidding." I don't think he heard that because he didn't respond to it, but the irony was even bigger: NOS was named for his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, but none of them uses the middle name from which we derive Garry. No, that name came marginally from the name of the variety-show host who introduced Carol Burnett to the world, a man name Garry Moore.
But mostly it came from the name of the best man and our wedding—my ex's best friend at the time, Gary Franks.
Way too weird for a Wednesday.
This one started out a bit ironically. The dogs set up a fuss when someone rang our doorbell (Parker sets up a fuss if a doorbell rings on tv), so I rounded them up, pushed Sherman out back, and answered it. The man outside said his name was Gary and he was selling meat out of the back of a pickup truck.
I have no idea why I suckered in to a door-to-door meat salesman (I may be advertising my complication in a stolen-meat scam, or we could die of tainted-meat disease), but I did, provided he let me wake up the chief cook around here, Number One Son—who shares the dude's first name.
I had to rattle NOS out of bed to get him to talk to the guy, and he decided that the meat looked tasty, so I decided to buy. Hey, times are hard, I've been lucky, and the meat really did look tasty. Besides, it was sort of ironic that this guy had the same name as NOS.
Which got weirder. After we decided on the sale, I pulled out my checkbook to pay the dude and needed to remember the date. I never know what day it is in the morning; I sort of keep up with days of the week at the office, but my life is so automated I almost don't recognize the day of the month even there. But 14 October is Mother and Daddy's anniversary, and I was writing a check to a man who had the same name as my son.
Only not quite. The dude asked me to make out the check to Gary Frank. I said, "You're kidding." I don't think he heard that because he didn't respond to it, but the irony was even bigger: NOS was named for his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, but none of them uses the middle name from which we derive Garry. No, that name came marginally from the name of the variety-show host who introduced Carol Burnett to the world, a man name Garry Moore.
But mostly it came from the name of the best man and our wedding—my ex's best friend at the time, Gary Franks.
Way too weird for a Wednesday.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Monica, Marcia, Mallory, Kelsey somehow got me here
The little Asian lady who strolled up behind me on the Wally World parking lot seemed to have a smile in her voice when she commented, "You look like you're having fun!" She was right, of course; I don't often pull out my cell phone to use its camera function, but the two cars parked in the next lane were just too much fun for me: one was a faded brown Chrysler New Yorker from the early ’80s, the other a blue Mazda 323 from probably the early ’90s. To any other shopper this evening, they were just a couple of slightly damaged old cars; to me, they were a swirl of memories of the "pretty car" I drove when the kids were small and Mokey Mazda, the first car each of them drove as they reached driving age.
Cars have always seemed like members of the family to me, from my earliest vague memories of the green woodie station wagon Daddy drove to the red and white, nine-passenger Chevy with its funny little jump seat so we smaller kids could crawl into the back, through a series of sedans up to the day Daddy proudly drove home in a sad little Corvair Monza that he announced was mine. From that day on, it's never mattered what anybody else was driving; the only car that had a personality was the one that belonged to me.
It wasn't always easy. Daddy had never been able to spring for a car for the three older siblings, and even though this one had been a steal at $150, it was probably still about $150 more than he had available to spend on a car for me. I didn't know that the dual-carburetor engine was supposed to be a cool thing, and I really didn't know that its cousin, the Monza Spyder, was a source of pride among sports car enthusiasts. I just knew Daddy had given away my dog and come home in this junker of a car.
For all I know, my little Monica Monza was a Spyder, but when I first drove her to school, she was mostly a huge embarrasment. For one thing, she was a 1961 vehicle on a 1967 parking lot, and for another, her rear-engine design made her the target of a campaign as "unsafe at any speed." (Later research showed that those claims were irrational, but still—I was only 17.) Worst of all, the previous owner had done his best to drive her wheels off, and I carried a gallon of gasoline in an old plastic bleach jug so I could prime those fine twin carburetors when the car wouldn't start on its own, which turned out to be most afternoons after school. In those days, we didn't think of carrying gasoline in a Clorox jug as being dangerous, but having to wait until the newer cars cleared the parking lot so I could drag out my gasoline and prime my carburetors was appalling. I could hardly wait for the school year to be over, which thankfully was a matter of only a couple of weeks.
As soon as I was safely home for the summer, Daddy pulled Monica into the carport and went to work on her. Stem to stern, bolt by bolt, he took apart every moving part and put it back together again. (A neighbor lady threatened to acquire additional car parts to add to his collection to see if he'd try to put them back in the Monza, too.) He had it ticking along beautifully a few weeks before time for my senior year to start, and since I no longer needed to prime the carburetors and the car was a new, shiny red with a fashionable white vinyl roof, I was tickled to have wheels I could take just about anywhere I wanted to go. Who cares that Anne Andres had a brand-new, baby blue Dodge Challenger? or Ann Anderson had the latest in new Mustangs? I had wheels!
And drive I did. I became the driver to get Little Brother to school; he cracked me up the afternoon he came bouncing out of the junior high school, thumped his palm on the trunk (which was in the front where otherwise the hood would have been), and announced that he was Joe Marvin Alligator Duck, a nickname that followed him around for at least the rest of the school year, usually shortened to Joe Duck.
I was the editor of the high school paper that year, and one morning a friend of mine and I made a 10-minute trip to the printer to approve the latest edition before it went to press. Only I made the mistake of letting my friend shift gears on my fancy three-on-the-floor drive, and he—like every other passenger except me and Joe Duck—managed to pull the stick completely out of the floorboards.That required me to coast into the Goodyear parking lot and call Daddy, who appeared a few minutes latter with a sheet of cardboard and a pair of pliers. He had us back on the road in 10 or 15 minutes, but it took longer than that to explain to Mrs. MacDonald why we were out of her class for so long.
Joe Duck and I were allowed to ride in Monica on family vacations, and we'd urge her up the hills of central Texas and then coast back down the other side. We didn't have air conditioning, but we rode with the wind in our hair and the radio on its highest volume, and we were in the car without Mother and Daddy—shear heaven to a couple of Texas teens.
When I went off to college the next fall, Joe Duck was 14 and had a driver's license, so Monica fell to him. After all, I was moving to Houston, and Daddy was the magic that made Monica run; she had to stay near him.
Three years later, Daddy suffered a massive coronary and died, and Mother declared the end of Monica Monza. She sent Joe Duck and me out in search of wheels on a promise to buy us each a car with Daddy's life insurance money. Our siblings were horrified: first, Daddy had given us Monica, and now Mother was buying us brand new cars. How spoiled we were!
The car I found was Marcia Malibu. Marcia had been a driver's ed car and was available for the same price as the smaller but sportier Chevy Nova that Joe Duck and I had first planned to buy. By that time, though, I was a college junior, and I was sure I needed a more sophisticated set of wheels. Besides, at that time, the Malibu was pretty much the darling of the road. Marcia was just on the inside of a tolerable shade of pea green, but I was thrilled to call her my own. Besides, it was one of her regular service checkups that led me to my future spouse. I eagerly watched the miles turn over until she got to 99,993, when my spouse announced that she was at the end of the road, so he drove her off to sell. I didn't forgive him for a year for driving her off a handful of miles before I would have gotten to watch the odometer roll over to a whole new string of zeroes.
His replacement was the only car I've ever owned that didn't get a name. Remembering that Joe Duck and I had at one time planned to buy matching Novas, he had exchanged my used Malibu for a used Nova that never quite seemed "right" to me. A friend of mine had recently traded in her Oldmobile for a Pontiac Sunbird—a sort of a feminine version of the powerhouse Firebird that seemed like just the ticket for me—and another had gotten a new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. And I had a beat-up old Nova. When I drove it to Bryan to apply for a job and lost the watch Mother and Daddy had given me for high school graduation, I decided the Nova had eaten my watch, and that didn't endear it to me. I never knew what the husband was thinking.
Shortly thereafter, though, I got pregnant with Number One Son, and I found that the Sunbird would have had the same limitation the Nova had: getting a baby in and out of a sports coupe with only two doors wasn't really a lot of fun. When Second Son came along a couple of years later, getting two babies in and out of the back seat was an even bigger pain. This time, when Spouse drove my car off to purchase a different one, I didn't even watch him leave; I figured this one was good riddance.
When he came back a few hours later in a shiny new Chrysler New Yorker, I had to agree with toddler NOS, whose first enthusiastic comment when he saw the car was, "Look, Mom, that's a pretty car!" This one really was a pretty car, a deep chocolate brown with a "brougham" vinyl top and "wire" wheels that looked pretty slick, even if I do say so myself. I guess if I had thought about it much, I could have come up with a "people" name for a New Yorker, but NOS was so happy with Pretty Car that that's what we called it for the next eight years, through all sorts of adventures until the Pretty Car on the outside starting showing signs of being the Tired Out car on the inside.
It had certainly met my needs for being able to get to the kids in the back seat; in fact, when the school where I taught had a rasher of teachers losing car radios to on-campus theft, I commented one afternoon that I hoped my car wouldn't be "hit" because my spouse would blow a fuse. One of the students reassured me: "Oh, don't you worry, Mrs. W," he said, "nobody's going to hit your car. It's the one with the three baby seats in the back!"
In fact, it was the only car the kids remembered ever having (and the only one Darling Daughter had ever known) when we decided to trade it in on a Mazda minivan, so you'd have thought I was selling their souls along with it. The salesman, who had a daughter DD's age, had seen that scene enough that he let it play out patiently, and I promised the kids we'd get cherry slushes on the way home that they could drink in the back of the new van. I stopped by an upholstery shop on the way home to find out what to do about the red dye on the new carpet.
Monica and Marcia had had clearly feminine names, and Pretty Car could hardly be considered a "name" at all, so I decided the minivan needed something sort of "neutral." I came up with Mallory; I usually thought of the van itself as being feminine, but I liked the gender-indefinite sound of the name. Mallory took us through Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts and learning to drive and a divorce, and Mallory faithfully kept on rolling. Thank goodness I wasn't saddled with car payments during those first few years on my own; whatever else ex-spouse had done, he had taken care of me financially by paying off our bills as we got them, and I'm still grateful to him for that.
When NOS reached 16 and was eligible to learn to drive, I went shopping for wheels for kids to drive, and that's when the 323 came into the picture. I probably paid too much for her, and I probably could have gotten a better car for what I spent, but I got wheels that kids could drive, and all of them were thrilled. The kids had been great fans of Fraggle Rock when they were younger, and teenage NOS took about a minute to determine the new little car's name had to be Mokey.
Mokey survived a number of dents, bangs, and rattles during her years with us, but she was sturdy and reliable, and I was glad to have her. I have no idea where she went that she shouldn't have, but those are secrets the kids can keep to themselves; I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.
When Darling Daughter got old enough to drive, Second Son was still driving Mokey (NOS had moved out of the house and was on his own for wheels), so I shopped till I got a steal on a little Geo Metro that looked like a great little car that was just her size. The Metro was standard shift, so the day I drove it home I took DD out to a quiet road near the house and had her drive and shift and stop and drive until I thought I could trust her to navigate the traffic mixture of young drivers and pedestrians around her school.
One thing I was sure of with a young driver new at standard shift: no left turns. I chanted that over and over on the way back to the house and as she charged out the door in the morning. Thirty minutes later, she was back on the stoop, shaking, and saying, "Mom, I wanted you to see that I'm safe, but I've killed Macy." I think that was the car's name, anyway; I'd owned it for less than 24 hours, and she had, indeed, already killed it, trying to make a left turn out of our neighborhood onto the four-lane road that connects the west side of town to the local university. She had walked the three blocks back to the house to tell me.
"What on earth were you doing here?" I demanded when I got to the scene. (Okay, I was probably screaming at her, but I like to pretend I was calmer than that.)
"Going to school," she insisted. Duh. But why was she at this intersection, where she had no choice but to turn left? "There's no other way to get there!" she cried. One more time, I reminded her: right at the end of our street, right onto the main drag through our neighborhood, right onto the road that goes all the way to the high school, including through a stoplight that would get her safely across the four-lane. Right into the high school parking lot. Right, right, right, right—never left.
No matter how many times I play it over in my mind, it still winds up with four kids in a little car that was creamed by a much larger Ford Bronco. But then I snap back to reality and remember the firemen dancing around the little pile of rubble that had been my little car and saying, "Look! It did exactly what it was supposed to do! None of the kids got hurt!" And they were exactly right: my daughter and three of her best friends (that I had had no idea would be in the car with her) had all walked away completely unhurt because the little car's front end had completely crumpled, leaving it totalled but all of them unscathed.
Her dad was gracious enough to choke up his contribution to the cost of the car (which was insured, but not for damage to itself), and shortly thereafter he passed his own old pickup truck to SS, leaving Mokey for DD to drive.
A year or so later I acquired another used car for her, this time a Nissan Pulsar that was cute as a bug (she adored the t-tops!) but that turned out to be a money pit: I bought it cheap, but then I started a long line of repairs that soon showed me the error of my ways. The salesman had been a friend of the family, but the money-pit-on-wheels didn't do much for our relationship. Trixie got DD through her freshman year of college, and DD was truly irate when I refused to let her take Trixie off to school in Los Angeles; the one good result of that was that DD managed to get more money than I expected when she sold the car to a friend who had grown to love it and who managed to wreck it before discovering that the purchase might not have been such a great deal.
The summer before DD made the move to Los Angeles, I had decided the time had come for me to move out of the minivan, for a couple of reasons. For one, it was 12 years old and I was growing tired of it, even though it still wasn't pressing too hard on that once-important 100,000 miles; after all, it was new enough that even 100,000 miles wouldn't roll the odometer over to a full row of zeroes. For another, except for an occasional trip to the hardware store to by goods for a new project, I really didn't have much use for a vehicle that big. In fact, by then SS was driving a Ford F150 pickup truck, and the hardware store didn't have anything I needed that wouldn't fit in a pickup truck. It was time to move on.
I was determined to do my homework, so I read the consumer guides, read the car columns, and test drove the likely candidates—a couple of Toyotas and a couple of Hondas. I had friends and family who were Honda devotees, but of the cars I drove, the Toyotas seemed to "fit" me better, and at the last minute I jumped ship from a loaded-out sporty version of Toyota's small Corolla to its slightly larger and more widely admired Camry. Even the very bottom of the line (the biggest one I thought I could swing financially) was so much more than I had dreamed of that I felt pretty classy; I had driven poor old Mallory for so long that I had no idea how many cool new amenities were available in even the barest of cars.
In fact, I was nervous enough about making such a big purchase that I had decided to let SS, who had bought his own pickup after graduation from high school, help me make the decision. I was down to the last few items when I realized that the Camry didn't seem to have automatic door locks, which were more important to me as a safety feature in parking lots at night than for any other reason. I swung by the McDonald's where he was working so I could quiz him on that when I finally realized that on the car I was driving, the doors locked as soon as I shifted into gear and didn't unlock until I told them to. This car had possibilities!
I bought Kelsey Camry in May, than DD came home from her first year of college and got a job delivering pizzas. There was no way I trusted Trixie to get her through pizza delivery, much less moving to Los Angeles. On a June business trip to Houston, I dropped into a Hyundai dealership to see if the cheap little Accents they offered would make me feel any better. The saleslady who helped me seemed to know where I was coming from, but she discouraged me from considering the Accent, pointing out advantages for a mom to putting her kid in the slightly larger—but only slightly more expensive—Elantra. The purchase itself was a crazy experience, but long story short was that DD drove home in Emma about 36 hours after I had first started to shop. Emma had 6,000 miles worth of pizza delivery before she hauled me and DD to Los Angeles a couple of months later and more than 75,000 miles when DD traded her in a few months ago on her own first car purchase, a brand-new Mini Cooper.
And I've made one more recent car purchase, too. Kevin Cavalier sits in front the house these days for NOS, who has moved back home to start junior college and try to buy himself a new lease on life. Kevin is a 2003 Chevy who's seen some long, hard miles, but NOS is trained as a mechanic and can at least keep the wheels going around for a while longer; at least, that's what I'm hoping. So maybe Kevin has some meaning for me that I hadn't expected, too. And maybe he's going to make himself a part of our little family of cars.
It was nice this evening to be reminded of the Pretty Car and Mokey. They, too, somehow got me here.
Cars have always seemed like members of the family to me, from my earliest vague memories of the green woodie station wagon Daddy drove to the red and white, nine-passenger Chevy with its funny little jump seat so we smaller kids could crawl into the back, through a series of sedans up to the day Daddy proudly drove home in a sad little Corvair Monza that he announced was mine. From that day on, it's never mattered what anybody else was driving; the only car that had a personality was the one that belonged to me.
It wasn't always easy. Daddy had never been able to spring for a car for the three older siblings, and even though this one had been a steal at $150, it was probably still about $150 more than he had available to spend on a car for me. I didn't know that the dual-carburetor engine was supposed to be a cool thing, and I really didn't know that its cousin, the Monza Spyder, was a source of pride among sports car enthusiasts. I just knew Daddy had given away my dog and come home in this junker of a car.
For all I know, my little Monica Monza was a Spyder, but when I first drove her to school, she was mostly a huge embarrasment. For one thing, she was a 1961 vehicle on a 1967 parking lot, and for another, her rear-engine design made her the target of a campaign as "unsafe at any speed." (Later research showed that those claims were irrational, but still—I was only 17.) Worst of all, the previous owner had done his best to drive her wheels off, and I carried a gallon of gasoline in an old plastic bleach jug so I could prime those fine twin carburetors when the car wouldn't start on its own, which turned out to be most afternoons after school. In those days, we didn't think of carrying gasoline in a Clorox jug as being dangerous, but having to wait until the newer cars cleared the parking lot so I could drag out my gasoline and prime my carburetors was appalling. I could hardly wait for the school year to be over, which thankfully was a matter of only a couple of weeks.
As soon as I was safely home for the summer, Daddy pulled Monica into the carport and went to work on her. Stem to stern, bolt by bolt, he took apart every moving part and put it back together again. (A neighbor lady threatened to acquire additional car parts to add to his collection to see if he'd try to put them back in the Monza, too.) He had it ticking along beautifully a few weeks before time for my senior year to start, and since I no longer needed to prime the carburetors and the car was a new, shiny red with a fashionable white vinyl roof, I was tickled to have wheels I could take just about anywhere I wanted to go. Who cares that Anne Andres had a brand-new, baby blue Dodge Challenger? or Ann Anderson had the latest in new Mustangs? I had wheels!
And drive I did. I became the driver to get Little Brother to school; he cracked me up the afternoon he came bouncing out of the junior high school, thumped his palm on the trunk (which was in the front where otherwise the hood would have been), and announced that he was Joe Marvin Alligator Duck, a nickname that followed him around for at least the rest of the school year, usually shortened to Joe Duck.
I was the editor of the high school paper that year, and one morning a friend of mine and I made a 10-minute trip to the printer to approve the latest edition before it went to press. Only I made the mistake of letting my friend shift gears on my fancy three-on-the-floor drive, and he—like every other passenger except me and Joe Duck—managed to pull the stick completely out of the floorboards.That required me to coast into the Goodyear parking lot and call Daddy, who appeared a few minutes latter with a sheet of cardboard and a pair of pliers. He had us back on the road in 10 or 15 minutes, but it took longer than that to explain to Mrs. MacDonald why we were out of her class for so long.
Joe Duck and I were allowed to ride in Monica on family vacations, and we'd urge her up the hills of central Texas and then coast back down the other side. We didn't have air conditioning, but we rode with the wind in our hair and the radio on its highest volume, and we were in the car without Mother and Daddy—shear heaven to a couple of Texas teens.
When I went off to college the next fall, Joe Duck was 14 and had a driver's license, so Monica fell to him. After all, I was moving to Houston, and Daddy was the magic that made Monica run; she had to stay near him.
Three years later, Daddy suffered a massive coronary and died, and Mother declared the end of Monica Monza. She sent Joe Duck and me out in search of wheels on a promise to buy us each a car with Daddy's life insurance money. Our siblings were horrified: first, Daddy had given us Monica, and now Mother was buying us brand new cars. How spoiled we were!
The car I found was Marcia Malibu. Marcia had been a driver's ed car and was available for the same price as the smaller but sportier Chevy Nova that Joe Duck and I had first planned to buy. By that time, though, I was a college junior, and I was sure I needed a more sophisticated set of wheels. Besides, at that time, the Malibu was pretty much the darling of the road. Marcia was just on the inside of a tolerable shade of pea green, but I was thrilled to call her my own. Besides, it was one of her regular service checkups that led me to my future spouse. I eagerly watched the miles turn over until she got to 99,993, when my spouse announced that she was at the end of the road, so he drove her off to sell. I didn't forgive him for a year for driving her off a handful of miles before I would have gotten to watch the odometer roll over to a whole new string of zeroes.
His replacement was the only car I've ever owned that didn't get a name. Remembering that Joe Duck and I had at one time planned to buy matching Novas, he had exchanged my used Malibu for a used Nova that never quite seemed "right" to me. A friend of mine had recently traded in her Oldmobile for a Pontiac Sunbird—a sort of a feminine version of the powerhouse Firebird that seemed like just the ticket for me—and another had gotten a new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. And I had a beat-up old Nova. When I drove it to Bryan to apply for a job and lost the watch Mother and Daddy had given me for high school graduation, I decided the Nova had eaten my watch, and that didn't endear it to me. I never knew what the husband was thinking.
Shortly thereafter, though, I got pregnant with Number One Son, and I found that the Sunbird would have had the same limitation the Nova had: getting a baby in and out of a sports coupe with only two doors wasn't really a lot of fun. When Second Son came along a couple of years later, getting two babies in and out of the back seat was an even bigger pain. This time, when Spouse drove my car off to purchase a different one, I didn't even watch him leave; I figured this one was good riddance.
When he came back a few hours later in a shiny new Chrysler New Yorker, I had to agree with toddler NOS, whose first enthusiastic comment when he saw the car was, "Look, Mom, that's a pretty car!" This one really was a pretty car, a deep chocolate brown with a "brougham" vinyl top and "wire" wheels that looked pretty slick, even if I do say so myself. I guess if I had thought about it much, I could have come up with a "people" name for a New Yorker, but NOS was so happy with Pretty Car that that's what we called it for the next eight years, through all sorts of adventures until the Pretty Car on the outside starting showing signs of being the Tired Out car on the inside.
It had certainly met my needs for being able to get to the kids in the back seat; in fact, when the school where I taught had a rasher of teachers losing car radios to on-campus theft, I commented one afternoon that I hoped my car wouldn't be "hit" because my spouse would blow a fuse. One of the students reassured me: "Oh, don't you worry, Mrs. W," he said, "nobody's going to hit your car. It's the one with the three baby seats in the back!"
In fact, it was the only car the kids remembered ever having (and the only one Darling Daughter had ever known) when we decided to trade it in on a Mazda minivan, so you'd have thought I was selling their souls along with it. The salesman, who had a daughter DD's age, had seen that scene enough that he let it play out patiently, and I promised the kids we'd get cherry slushes on the way home that they could drink in the back of the new van. I stopped by an upholstery shop on the way home to find out what to do about the red dye on the new carpet.
Monica and Marcia had had clearly feminine names, and Pretty Car could hardly be considered a "name" at all, so I decided the minivan needed something sort of "neutral." I came up with Mallory; I usually thought of the van itself as being feminine, but I liked the gender-indefinite sound of the name. Mallory took us through Cub Scouts and Girl Scouts and learning to drive and a divorce, and Mallory faithfully kept on rolling. Thank goodness I wasn't saddled with car payments during those first few years on my own; whatever else ex-spouse had done, he had taken care of me financially by paying off our bills as we got them, and I'm still grateful to him for that.
When NOS reached 16 and was eligible to learn to drive, I went shopping for wheels for kids to drive, and that's when the 323 came into the picture. I probably paid too much for her, and I probably could have gotten a better car for what I spent, but I got wheels that kids could drive, and all of them were thrilled. The kids had been great fans of Fraggle Rock when they were younger, and teenage NOS took about a minute to determine the new little car's name had to be Mokey.
Mokey survived a number of dents, bangs, and rattles during her years with us, but she was sturdy and reliable, and I was glad to have her. I have no idea where she went that she shouldn't have, but those are secrets the kids can keep to themselves; I'm pretty sure I don't want to know.
When Darling Daughter got old enough to drive, Second Son was still driving Mokey (NOS had moved out of the house and was on his own for wheels), so I shopped till I got a steal on a little Geo Metro that looked like a great little car that was just her size. The Metro was standard shift, so the day I drove it home I took DD out to a quiet road near the house and had her drive and shift and stop and drive until I thought I could trust her to navigate the traffic mixture of young drivers and pedestrians around her school.
One thing I was sure of with a young driver new at standard shift: no left turns. I chanted that over and over on the way back to the house and as she charged out the door in the morning. Thirty minutes later, she was back on the stoop, shaking, and saying, "Mom, I wanted you to see that I'm safe, but I've killed Macy." I think that was the car's name, anyway; I'd owned it for less than 24 hours, and she had, indeed, already killed it, trying to make a left turn out of our neighborhood onto the four-lane road that connects the west side of town to the local university. She had walked the three blocks back to the house to tell me.
"What on earth were you doing here?" I demanded when I got to the scene. (Okay, I was probably screaming at her, but I like to pretend I was calmer than that.)
"Going to school," she insisted. Duh. But why was she at this intersection, where she had no choice but to turn left? "There's no other way to get there!" she cried. One more time, I reminded her: right at the end of our street, right onto the main drag through our neighborhood, right onto the road that goes all the way to the high school, including through a stoplight that would get her safely across the four-lane. Right into the high school parking lot. Right, right, right, right—never left.
No matter how many times I play it over in my mind, it still winds up with four kids in a little car that was creamed by a much larger Ford Bronco. But then I snap back to reality and remember the firemen dancing around the little pile of rubble that had been my little car and saying, "Look! It did exactly what it was supposed to do! None of the kids got hurt!" And they were exactly right: my daughter and three of her best friends (that I had had no idea would be in the car with her) had all walked away completely unhurt because the little car's front end had completely crumpled, leaving it totalled but all of them unscathed.
Her dad was gracious enough to choke up his contribution to the cost of the car (which was insured, but not for damage to itself), and shortly thereafter he passed his own old pickup truck to SS, leaving Mokey for DD to drive.
A year or so later I acquired another used car for her, this time a Nissan Pulsar that was cute as a bug (she adored the t-tops!) but that turned out to be a money pit: I bought it cheap, but then I started a long line of repairs that soon showed me the error of my ways. The salesman had been a friend of the family, but the money-pit-on-wheels didn't do much for our relationship. Trixie got DD through her freshman year of college, and DD was truly irate when I refused to let her take Trixie off to school in Los Angeles; the one good result of that was that DD managed to get more money than I expected when she sold the car to a friend who had grown to love it and who managed to wreck it before discovering that the purchase might not have been such a great deal.
The summer before DD made the move to Los Angeles, I had decided the time had come for me to move out of the minivan, for a couple of reasons. For one, it was 12 years old and I was growing tired of it, even though it still wasn't pressing too hard on that once-important 100,000 miles; after all, it was new enough that even 100,000 miles wouldn't roll the odometer over to a full row of zeroes. For another, except for an occasional trip to the hardware store to by goods for a new project, I really didn't have much use for a vehicle that big. In fact, by then SS was driving a Ford F150 pickup truck, and the hardware store didn't have anything I needed that wouldn't fit in a pickup truck. It was time to move on.
I was determined to do my homework, so I read the consumer guides, read the car columns, and test drove the likely candidates—a couple of Toyotas and a couple of Hondas. I had friends and family who were Honda devotees, but of the cars I drove, the Toyotas seemed to "fit" me better, and at the last minute I jumped ship from a loaded-out sporty version of Toyota's small Corolla to its slightly larger and more widely admired Camry. Even the very bottom of the line (the biggest one I thought I could swing financially) was so much more than I had dreamed of that I felt pretty classy; I had driven poor old Mallory for so long that I had no idea how many cool new amenities were available in even the barest of cars.
In fact, I was nervous enough about making such a big purchase that I had decided to let SS, who had bought his own pickup after graduation from high school, help me make the decision. I was down to the last few items when I realized that the Camry didn't seem to have automatic door locks, which were more important to me as a safety feature in parking lots at night than for any other reason. I swung by the McDonald's where he was working so I could quiz him on that when I finally realized that on the car I was driving, the doors locked as soon as I shifted into gear and didn't unlock until I told them to. This car had possibilities!
I bought Kelsey Camry in May, than DD came home from her first year of college and got a job delivering pizzas. There was no way I trusted Trixie to get her through pizza delivery, much less moving to Los Angeles. On a June business trip to Houston, I dropped into a Hyundai dealership to see if the cheap little Accents they offered would make me feel any better. The saleslady who helped me seemed to know where I was coming from, but she discouraged me from considering the Accent, pointing out advantages for a mom to putting her kid in the slightly larger—but only slightly more expensive—Elantra. The purchase itself was a crazy experience, but long story short was that DD drove home in Emma about 36 hours after I had first started to shop. Emma had 6,000 miles worth of pizza delivery before she hauled me and DD to Los Angeles a couple of months later and more than 75,000 miles when DD traded her in a few months ago on her own first car purchase, a brand-new Mini Cooper.
And I've made one more recent car purchase, too. Kevin Cavalier sits in front the house these days for NOS, who has moved back home to start junior college and try to buy himself a new lease on life. Kevin is a 2003 Chevy who's seen some long, hard miles, but NOS is trained as a mechanic and can at least keep the wheels going around for a while longer; at least, that's what I'm hoping. So maybe Kevin has some meaning for me that I hadn't expected, too. And maybe he's going to make himself a part of our little family of cars.
It was nice this evening to be reminded of the Pretty Car and Mokey. They, too, somehow got me here.
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