I don’t take myself too seriously; most of the time I realize I go through many of the days bumbling or stumbling, but one thing I do fairly well is drive a car. Yes, just like Rainman I am a good driver. Or so I thought. Today as I was returning home from swimming laps I spied a couple of my former preschool students selling lemonade by the side of our road. They recognized my wee blue beetle bug and waved me down for a quick drink. As I pulled over to the side of the road I realized I was sticking out just a bit and pulled up another few feet when all of a sudden the horizon turned all diagonal and my head hit the steering wheel. For a moment I couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened but when I looked at the car door nearly above my head I realized that somehow something had swallowed the right front end of my car. One moment I was all parallel and the next very much not. So I pushed up and out of my car, a hard thing because bug doors are super heavy, and then hopped down to the ground to see that the opposite back end of the car was way up in the air and nowhere near the road where it was obviously supposed to be. And then I spied the faces of my former students, their eyes huge and their mouths open in large O’s. One of them yelled, “Mommy! Miss Heather’s car disappeared in our ditch! Come quick.”
And yes, that is exactly what had happened. I had somehow managed to find the one giant hole concealed in the long grasses in which to sink my wee car. The mom and another driver at the lemonade stand tried to push me out but I eventually ended up getting pulled out by a strapping youngish dude in a giant wheeled Jeep who happened to have a long chord with a bug rescuing hook at the end. Clever fellow to carry a thing like that. At one point there were about eight cars stopped in the rode while we blocked all access.
This is after the women tried to push the car out of the hole. At one point one of them suggested getting a couple of guys to just lift it out because of its smallness. I might have to hide this picture from Loren because the next time he asks me for a driving practice I can no longer pretend my record is sparkling clean.
