Car stories

A few years ago I was inspired to write about my father’s driving habits and car maintenance practices for this esteemed paper. I reread that piece recently and found it to be brutally honest, and miraculous, at the same time! Since Dad was prone to being a master of Severe Automobile Mismanagement, most appropriate as his name was Sam, it was truly unbelievable that our family of five, always squished into the car of the moment, with often a fat, asthmatic, dog vying for her own floor level space, survived at all. The mishaps leading to death or injury were always only potential but they were constant and remarkable. Hardly any substantial trip, like to Parksville for example, or to visit aunts, uncles, and cousins in Queens, was without some drama. Usually these were flat tires, but I do the tire industry disservice when I describe what blew out on our journeys as tires. They were actually ancient remnants of rubber whose markings had been totally obliterated, making them barely recognizable as tires at all. Might they have served as mirrors, reflecting our unshocked faces as we, meaning Dad, dealt with yet another flat? Well, they were probably not quite that bad but they were contenders.

I thought about those adventures with my father, going back over 80 years or so, as our own well-maintained, law-abiding cars, and drivers, met with some unexpected and unwelcome happenings.

Very recently my husband went for a haircut in honor of an upcoming wedding, following my nasty comments about his “do.” He returned looking handsome and tidy, bemoaning that this was the most expensive haircut of his life. Since it was a simple crew done at a local West Orange barbershop, not in some elegant and famous Manhattan clip joint, I needed an explanation for the price, which he estimated to be in the thousands of bucks. So, here’s the back story.

A couple of months ago he parked the car at his preferred shopping venue, a place on Route 10 where he could spend hours, if not days, admiring the selection of hardware and housewares and building supplies and even lumber. Throughout our many years of marriage I have joked with him that he surely must have a lady friend working there, even as she would now be over 80, with some possible reduction in glamor. He has also never come back from that mammoth store without a bag of something, boring to me but fun and fascinating for him. My own rare visits to that same emporium have always been marked by extreme boredom and yearning for escape. Therefore, his visits are almost always solo.

Such was the case a few months back when he diligently parked and did his shopping, enjoying every moment of it. Unhappily, he emerged to find that an errant shopping cart had found itself a new home, resting inconveniently on the driver’s door of our car. Since cars today are seemingly made of some sort of thin plastic and can’t resist easy damage, the door was seriously injured, although it still opened and closed. Until it didn’t.

One day it simply groaned in agony and squealed in pain, and refused to open. A big expensive repair was needed, and soon. Since we were imminently leaving for a trip to ports in Europe and Israel, that seemed the optimal time for the repair work. And so it was! We came home to a car as good as new, minus dents, damage and any sign of suffering or injury.

That lasted one whole day. That’s it. One day. Until the day of the haircut.

Thus, he arrived home from the barber, which is about three city blocks from our home, having parked the flawlessly repaired vehicle in a nice expansive suburban parking lot, got himself speedily shorn and beautified, and returned to the very newly repaired, also beautified car, to see that the evil eye had once again chosen our car for damnation. The damage, severe and truly ugly, was on the opposite side from the shopping cart encounter, on both doors of the passenger side. The repaired car had survived less than one day without further injury. Some might say it was predestined.

So we now find ourselves yet again with a destructed vehicle. And if we needed more proof that things were just not going our way, we decided to take an Uber to the wedding, which was in Manhattan. Suffice it to say that the traffic was so impossible that it took us almost three hours to arrive at the simcha, causing us to miss the chuppah entirely. The return trip was no better, also close to three hours.

Maybe we should have taken New York City’s latest advance in mass transit, the Manhattan equivalent of a Thai tuk tuk, the newly ubiquitous rickshaw, which couldn’t have been slower! Despite our issues the young couple are officially man and wife! Mazal tov.

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of nine. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

opinion