Don’t let the sound of your own wheels…

…be just inches from your ear as your car runs over you. Thinking about my recent streak of, well, interesting luck, I got to thinking about the last time we had a similar streak.

It was May and June of 1993, and there had been a series of car accidents (I swear the Rush-Conway family holds the record for accidents in which the cars were parked and unoccupied, which may mean my friend Linda is right: I’m not invisible, I have a target on my head), then a tree fell on our house and a pickup truck broke down in front of our home.

The latter may seem like no big deal, even when he asked if he could leave the vehicle in the driveway and come by to work on it the next day. No problem. I mean, both of our cars had been totaled in the last accident, so WE weren’t using it, you know?

Well, then he broke a part, and it had to be ordered. So the vehicle stayed in our yard another day, and it was on that day that my 12-year-old son called me at the office to say, “Don’t worry, Mom. I put the fire out. They were too stupid to operate the fire extinguisher.”

My best guess is that the gentleman got a friend to help him with the repair, and while one tried to prime the carburetor by pouring gasoline into it from a plastic milk jug, the other cranked over the engine prematurely. Apparently, the milk jug man dropped the container on the lawn when the fire reached his hand.

I was completely sympathetic to this guy’s plight, because when we made our final car payment in 1983 and I told my husband I would never have another car payment, he looked at me in that patronizing way men have that says, “Okay, dear. Whatever you say.”

I have, since that time, owned more than my share of $50 automobiles.

It takes some talent to find and make useful a car for that price. Owning and operating double-digit vehicles also requires a keen ability to adapt to less-than-perfect operating conditions and a well-developed sense of adventure.

For instance, one such vehicle only honked while making left turns, required the driver to enter the vehicle from the passenger side and had to be hotwired to start. You make allowances for extra time for these little rituals and get on with your life.

More than one vehicle needed ignition system repairs for an extended period of time, and we became adept at finding just the right parking spots from which to get a rolling start and pop the clutch.

When I was about 19, I drove one of our non-starting vehicles to a friend’s house. If she’d lived in a flatter area, I’d have sworn we were in Nebraska. There wasn’t a hill to be found within miles of her place, so I found the straightest, flattest place I could, figuring it would give me lots of room to push-start the stupid thing.

Upon leaving, the good sport that she was, she offered to help push. It wasn’t necessary, the Toyota Corolla being a small, lightweight car, but it turned out to be a lucky thing she was there.
I was used to this routine, so I opened the door, put one hand on the wheel, the other on the frame and took off. When I thought we had the thing at sufficient speed, I started to jump in.
It was at that moment that a driver down the road decided to back out of his driveway without looking. Horrified, knowing there was no way to stop the car in time to prevent the accident, I froze. Unfortunately, the car didn’t, and my foot was already in it. The Corolla continued under its own momentum with my ankle wedged between the driver’s seat and the frame.

The other car finally saw all of us and hurriedly pulled back into his driveway. After being dragged about 25 feet, the car slowly rolled to a stop. I sat up to untangle my leg and assess the extent of my road-rash. There, upside down in the driver’s seat, was my friend, both hands planted firmly on the brake. She had dived through the passenger window, and never having learned to drive and knowing nothing about the hand brake, went for the brake she did know.

I laughed until I couldn’t breathe.

We pushed it over to the side of the road, put it in gear and set the brake. I called my husband to remove the car, since I couldn’t push a baby stroller at this point, and, frankly, the first place I would have liked to push it was over a cliff.

My friend called for another ride for us, and we survived to drive off with a gas pump another day. But that’s another story.

Reprinted courtesy Eagle Newspapers, Syracuse, New York.