Wheels!

The old saying goes, "be careful what you wish for," but maybe it should also include, "be careful what you threaten" as well. When I was a teenager, my parents and other relatives enjoyed teasing me about how my attitudes would change one day when I became a parent. Part of the middle-age package included the acquisition of a minivan. I swore up and down that I would never, ever, if the choice was a tricycle with a shoddy wheel or a minivan and I was being chased by an angry mob, would I ever buy a minivan. Luckily for me, my family is too gracious to tease me overly much when we had our baby and did indeed purchase a minivan (that, and being such harried, harassed parents gave them far more material to tease us about than just our wheels).

Now, it wasn't easy for me to give in to the pressures to get a minivan. I have always loved well engineered cars and agile handling, and in a past life, nothing gave me greater joy than driving an Audi S4 sports car and cruising the Golden Gate bridge at 80 miles an hour and then blithely dropping down a gear and passing another car at 90 miles an hour with mere nudge on the gas (obviously not in rush hour). Despite the fact that we paid more for our monthly car payments than many recent grads paid for their rent, it was a joy to drive. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that there are even Audi clubs that would get together on the weekends to drive up the windy, twisty roads at "top speed" to the summit of Mt. Tam just north of San Francisco. And yes, we did that more than once too. And then there were the little drives down to Monterey and up to Napa in the vintage Porsche with the removable top (which you had to remove yourself prior to driving as this was 1970 and even Porsche owners couldn't expect everything to be automated) and the joy of class German engineering beneath and surrounding you. It doesn't hurt that I happened to be driving this vintage Porsche when I was side swiped by a drunk driver high on weed and I easily survived without a scratch (as did my car) while the other SUV was not so lucky. Anyway, the point of this is all to say that I really enjoyed cars that were a pleasure to drive.

So the first step down the rabbit hole was when we became far more practical and sold the fun toys of newly found financial independence and acquired a fun, but practical compact sedan instead. It was in this everyday sedan that we brought home our baby girl from the hospital. For the first couple of months, this was fine, as long as my 6'5" husband didn't mind bending like a pretzel to fit in the front seats, no one ever wanted to sit in the back, and we didn't need more than two bags of groceries (that impractically expensive stroller we discussed earlier took pride of place and volume in the trunk). So on a whim, a simple impulse, we decided to try out a minivan one weekend "just for fun" (and yes, this is one of many signs that our lives had changed irrevocably with the addition of a child).

And as the salesman opened up the dual automated side doors and the trunk and my tall husband sat up front and he showed us how to store the third row into the floor . . . we were in love. Gone were the days of struggling with an increasingly heavier combination of baby and carseat while fumbling with keys and doors and bending over to click her into the car. Gone were the days of folding like a pretzel, desperately hoping not to happen into an accident and have your body compress into a tangle of limbs and chest and head. Gone were the days of choosing between the stroller to take her around the stores and actually buying anything in the stores. Gone were the days of having visitors and family members rent a car because we couldn't fit them in our only car (well, this one is a debatable advantage actually, but that's an entirely different topic for another post). We were smitten. And this was before we were shown the DVD system (subject of a previous post) and the lojack and alarm systems (which were the bane of my existence when they continually warbled at 3am and woke everyone in the neighborhood including our newborn who had finally gone off just because a tiny flower or nut from the tree above the car dared to land on the roof). This was a very good thing and when the inventory showed that it was available that day in our favorite color, and they honored the price that we wanted to pay and gave us a good trade-in for the former compact car, we were out the door in our new set of wheels.

And there's just something to be said about being surrounded by that many tons of metal and space and airbags that cushions you against the taunting and jeering looks of loitering teenagers and their judgement (and this very observation of said teenagers is only further proof that we are firmly established a deeply middle-aged now). But while they jerry-rig the roof of their cars with a couple of jump ropes and some steadfast determination to drive home a piece of furniture they have salvaged from someone's refuse pile on the lawn, we can quickly transform our rolling living room into a cavernous space capable of any amount of damage to our Costco credit card or great deal from Craigslist. And once we figured out how to disable that incredibly aggravating alarm (after congratulating ourselves on paying for that last minute hard-sell impulse buy), we have never looked back. Someday I'm sure we will look back and realize just how dorky and yuppie we were driving around town with self-satisfied smirks on our faces at our superior choice, but for now, we'll push that sunroof button, pump up the volume on the Veggie Tales DVD, and let the good times roll.