Now, I’m not a big believer in signs. Okay, I am, but not when they apply to me. But seriously, I think God is trying to tell me to stop driving my Neon.
First of all, let me just say, I *heart* my Dodge Neon. I *heart* all Dodge Neons. The day they stopped producing them, I think I cried a little bit. I drove this car all over the place, put over 140k miles on it, and it never complained. There was an incident last year when a hose to the transmission blew and I got stranded on a lonely country back road, but besides that, it has never betrayed me.
So why would the Lord take out some personal vendetta against my beautiful car (affectionately nicknamed the S.S. Filthy Whore)?
Timeline:
- Thanksgiving Day, 2007: A deer wanders into the darkened country lane we are traveling down. I swerve to avoid it but do not achieve my objective, smearing the deer all over the side of the vehicle, resulting in a huge, deer shaped dent, an ill-fitting hubcap full of bloody fur and a missing passenger side mirror.
- Just Before Christmas, 2007: Something goes horribly wrong with my alternator. Something that the guys at the shop share stories about, because none of them have ever seen a coil fry and shoot out sparks like a Fourth of July fireworks spectacular the way mine does. Also, they have no idea why it has done this, because it is less than a year old. Before they send it home, they repair the transmission hose, which has begun to loosen up again.
- Today, 2007: On the one day between insurance policies, my husband hydroplanes and slams into the back of a vehicle making a left-hand turn while on his way to take our son to school. The driver’s side door slips on the frame, making it impossible to open. The hood crumples and the front lights are blown out like they’d just been used to illuminate the climactic chord in a circa-1989 hair-metal music video or the final, triumphant home run of a baseball movie.
No problems for years. YEARS. I’ve been driving this car since August of 2001 and have had nothing at all happen. The check engine light has never even come on. And now, this string of bad and expensive happenings. This leads me to conclude that either:
- God is trying to kill me. This seems supported by the malicious act of his woodland henchman jumping gleefully to his death in a suicide attack on my car, but is unsupported by the lack of my presence at the scene of the most recent accident and the non-lethal alternator pyrotechnics display.
- God is trying to kill my car. The events are certainly things that could have happened without any supernatural help, but the chronological proximity of each incident to the next suggest otherworldly forces are at work.
- I accidentally kissed Lindsey Lohan without my knowledge and got her bad luck, a la that stupid movie of hers I can’t believe I watched all the way through. The main flaw in this theory is that I think I would have had some kind of cold sore outbreak at this point if this were really the culprit.
- All the forces in the universe are trying to tell me that it is time to buy a grown-up car. Perhaps one that doesn’t look like a toy and isn’t covered with stickers that say things like “My other ride is your mom” and “Kiss me, I’m a pirate”. This action may also have the added benefit of reducing the steely glares of the other moms at Jr.’s school.
I have to give this some serious thought. Maybe I stumbled onto an indian burial ground or something. Maybe there used to be a cemetery under my driveway and they didn’t move the bodies, they only moved the stones. I don’t have a clue. In any case, I have this sinking feeling that I will be suffering terminal lightness of wallet pretty soon.