Bye bye dream car

All I have ever wanted to drive is a Subaru Outback.  I know, how Lesbian-ic of me.  Cliche, but true, it was my dream car.  Finally, I'd talked Amy into letting me get it (well, I coerced her into a test drive, where I let the dealer talk me into signing a lot of paper work with words like "interest" and "principle" sprinkled heavily throughout).  And that was it, I owned a modest, pre-owned version of my dream car.  I loved it.

One month after I got it, I inadvertantly kept moving forward in a line of traffic that had suddenly ceased to be moving forward.  I should have known it was a bad sign, but this was my dream car, damn it, and I wasn't going to give it up.  It was a little blemished, but family came to visit eventually and they saw the new car, and the damage from the accident was so minimal on the surface (I'm sure there were hidden problems that I chose to ignore) that they never even knew I had been in a fender bender.

A short time after the first fender bender, I can't remember how long exactly, but I do know that the sting of the first accident was still burning a bit against my love for my car.  We were leaving a parking lot, going really slowly, when a car backed into us, and mangled the back right panel and bumper.  I promptly had that damage fixed, and it was nearly good as new, but I was beginning to believe that my dream car was cursed.

A month to the day of getting my car back from second accident, I was rear-ended at a stop sign.  Damage was minimal, but enough to have the car in the shop for about a week being repaired for a third time.  The writing was on the wall, THIS particular Outback was NOT the car for me...it had been tainted and ruined forever, and I was pretty sure that there was a hex on the thing making me invisible to other drivers on the road, who longed to run into me willy nilly.  There were not only the actual accidents, but countless other incidences when it seemed that other drivers simply had not seen me at all, and if I hadn't learned to drive so defensively after the accidents, I could have been seriously injured.  The scary part was that by the second and third scuffles, I was pregnant with the boys.  My dream car was an inexplicable death magnet.  What's a girl to do? I decided that I hadn't had the car long enough to really find something new, so the sour taste I had in my mouth for it would just have to be swallowed, and I would just have to find a way to make peace with this piece-of-shit car.  Besides, how many accidents could you statistically be in, if they were two-thirds not your fault, and you'd never been in an accident once before this when you were driving?  Odds were the accidents were over, right?  The accidents did seem to be over, but only because I became hyper-vigillant to crazy drivers, something that really only does me good, and everyone should be on the alert for.

Then the boys arrived.  We added two car seats and a double stroller to the standard features of our Outback, and promptly realized that we had far too little automobile real estate.  We had none left to be shared with guests, or even our own legs, and this was just not going to work.  We searched long and hard, and after 7 months of babies and their stuff, and several cramped road trips, we decided enough was enough, and the car had to go.  It simply was not our dream car for the here and now.

We may have gone a little too far in the opposite direction, but we will never complain about wishing we had just gone bigger.  We are now the proud owners of a Mormon Assault Vehicle aka the Chevy Suburban.  Come on over and party, we have room in the car to drive you all home, and we can even watch movies in there.  Stretch out and enjoy the ride!

Comments

[Darcy]

Mormon Assault Vehicle, is that like an MAV? My neighbors used to have a gigantic Mormon van that their dad referred to as the "Mean Green Mormon Machine". Their mother used to threaten to throw children out the window on the freeway when they would argue in the back seat.