Reminiscent

A few weeks ago while visiting my sister’s, she’d shoved an old tape into the VCR.  In the home movie, her twenty-four-year-old son, just a toddler during the filming, was caught nodding off in the high chair, just after taking one last bite of sandwich.  He’d nod, twitch, nod, twitch, until his little face finally fell one last time onto the tray to stay.  We all laughed. 

In another clip, our children, all diminutive at the time, hunted in her back yard for Easter eggs.  Hot Wheelz wore a pair of blue shorts, really short and really bright by today’s standards, emphasizing skinny white legs.  Coco had an unkempt look to her permed and crimped hair, and Cheezy had a head of the wavy orangish hair he was nicknamed for.  We all laughed as he passed by his present from the Easter bunny over and over again.  He still can’t find squat.  The GAP was nowhere to be seen.  She was a foreign exchange student in France at the time.  I wore a pink jersey dress and big glasses with giant pink round lenses.  I looked like a blushing fly.

Last night I received a phone call.  Coco had been in an accident.  Fortunately it was a fender bender; unfortunately, it was her fault.  She would be spending the night.

The call was reminiscent of many other dreaded calls.  The Ford Tempo that survived a bad e-brake turn, only to die and be wrapped in duct tape when someone else used the middle turning lane as a thru traffic lane and hit Cheezy when he made a left turn.  He’d driven a friend home from out of state, and I’d flown there to drive back home with him.  He was on his way to the airport to pick me up.  Ah, then there was Poopito – the Nissan Sentra, the color of … well, you can guess by the name bestowed by Coco.  Poopito with the cockeyed water spritzer, bit the dust before its time.  The Vanagon with virtual shock absorbers that one day just couldn’t…  The Totoya Corolla who died in Las Vegas on its drive home from Utah, and the other Corolla, too…  The Blazer whose windshield was shattered when the tire tread from my parent’s van flew off as we traveled following one another, who finally met its maker (Chevy, that is) only days after changing from full coverage to liability only.  The Oldsmobile Cutlass that was hit from behind when Coco stopped for an accident and the person behind her did not…  The VW Jetta that couldn’t survive being sideswiped by an 18-wheeler…  The Toyota Camry that just wore itself out after 300,000 miles — lasting so long basically because of a sort of “auto plastic surgery” – rebuilt piece by piece from the many accidents it had endured.  The GAP got in an accident coming out of the driveway of the body repair shop.  She even got rear-ended in a VW Passat rental car.  And that was after Couponman, in the morning, backed into a post in the same rental.  He hadn’t had time to report the first accident, but luckily, if you can call it luck, later in the day the GAP was rear-ended in the same rental.  The damage from her accident covered up Couponman’s mishap.  The number of cars we’ve owned crashed in our family is astronomical. 

Today it took me ten minutes to back carefully out of my own garage, just like when there had six automobiles for a two-car garage in a town with a no night parking on the streets city ordinance.  The garage occupant had to play musical cars to get out.  If we hadn’t gone through so many cars, financially we could have afforded at least a three-car garage.

Falling asleep in my food, bad hair and bad style days, the car crashes…  all family rights of passage reminiscent of my past life…  I wish.  But most things have a way of working themselves out.  In the home movie, the little nephew was carried to bed by his mom, and Cheezy finally found the hidden Easter gift.  Tonight I got an unexpected visit from Coco, and Albert (her car) gets a new front grill, missing since her cross-country trip a couple of years ago.  That kind of luck doesn’t happen every day.  Thank heavens!

Related posts:

1. The secret of coping with bad days
2. Sunday morning with kids
3. List for the doctor
4. Memories are forever
5. Small things