It Should Have Been In The Gargantua

Albuquerque received another wonderful snow fall, and the schools are closed due to hazardous driving conditions. I am happy to have the day off. However, I did something VERY stupid.

My fourth grade car (nine years old), my thirty miles to the gallon in town and forty-one miles to the gallon on the highway little Saturn, my little, quick, blue gem with the stiff seats and the rattly ride and the ten disc CD player that takes up most of the trunk but sounds really good if the fan motor isn't blowing for the heater or the air-conditioner, is in the body shop. A lady whacked it with her big, huge, monstrous truck and dented the left front fender just a tad, so my little Saturn is being repaired. Her insurance company generously and rightly paid for me to have a rental car to drive while my Saturn is in the body shop. The rental car is a big, huge, monstrous, gigantic, typical, modern-day American Gas Hog that can pass everything except a gas station, and it needs but doesn't come equipped with a tugboat to get it in and out of parking spaces. I don’t remember the name of the car, but I think if I was given the power to name the……..”Thing”, I would call it a:

1) Ford Whale

2) Chevy Guzzler

3) Buick Behemoth

4) Pontiac Titanic

5) GMC Mammoth

6) Chrysler Colossus

But I digress. I was talking about my act of stupidity. When I picked up the rental car early yesterday morning, I was in a hurry to get to school so I grabbed my stuff out of my Saturn and put it in the Wake Maker, but I forgot one thing: my wife’s Valentine’s card I had hidden under the passenger seat of my Saturn. So this morning I sneak out to the garage to get my wife’s Valentine’s card so I can put it on the kitchen table so when she comes in to get her coffee and sits down and starts sipping in that cozy, enchanting way she does that makes me happy to be with her, she’ll see the card propped up on the table and will open it, and she’ll gaze into my eyes and kiss me, and laugh, and cry.

But NO!! My Saturn isn’t in the garage! It’s at the body shop, being repaired. In the garage is this empty space because the Beast won’t fit in my garage. It's out in my driveway crushing cement and it doesn’t have the Valentine’s card in it either, because I am a knucklehead and left it in the Saturn.

So this morning I sat down and drank my acid-free, decaffeinated coffee because of my babyfied, old man tummy, and I saw my wife’s card, and I opened it, and I gazed into her eyes, and I kissed her, and I laughed, and I cried, and I told her I bought her card two weeks ago. I mentioned that it was carefully selected out of thousands because it told her how much I loved her in the way I wanted to say it. “But it’s in the Saturn, baby. Sorry.”

She forgave me, but I won’t forgive myself so easily.