Car Trouble

Posted on 01. Jun, 2009 by admin in After The Bubbly

A couple of summers ago, I was unloading an obscene amount of groceries when I noticed a thick pink substance on the garage floor. Pink lemonade maybe? But it appeared to be coming from inside the car. After I got my dairy and frozen goods out of the sweltering trunk, I dipped my finger into the pink stuff. It didn’t smell like anything, so how bad could it be? It looked about as worrisome as IHOP syrup, which is only dangerous to my thighs.

About an hour later I had to run an urgent errand. (It was probably something as important as a grocery run for string cheese.) Because my husband was out of town, I had another car to drive, one which did not have pink goo oozing out of it. However, I chose to drive the leaky car. It started and drove fine, until the thermometer light came on. I tensed up when it started to blink, even though I had no idea what that meant.

If I designed cars, there would be a light that said, Pull Over. And if you didn’t immediately comply, another light would come on that said, NOW! If you still didn’t get the hint, the car would turn itself off. But my car doesn’t have this handy imaginary feature. Despite the warning light, my trip was uneventful. I finished my urgent errand and drove home.

The next afternoon, after loading into my car five children, four snorkels, two masks, a box of crackers, forty-five fruit snacks, a gross of beach towels, and enough juice to flood a small country, the car wouldn’t start. I tried again while the children whined, hot and cranky. Clearly this was another urgent situation so I did what I had to do. I switched cars and went to the pool.

The rough part was calling my husband. “Do you want to hear the bad news?” I asked.

“Bad news?” I told him about the harmless-smelling gunk, the flashing red thermometer, and the non-starting car. Luckily I married a man who remains calm in the face of all manner of mechanical trouble.

“So was the car leaking while you were driving?”

“No,” I said. “It was in the garage.”

“And the light, when was that flashing?”

Here’s where things started to turn against me. “Oh, well see, I needed to go to the –“

“You drove the car?”

… Read the rest of this story in the June Issue of Peekaboo or at afterthebubbly.blogspot.com