|
3/10/1999 A One-Car Family in a Two-Car World(Or, When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Bake Cookies)We weren't always a one-car family. In the summer of 1997 a tree in front of our house toppled in a windstorm and crushed our Honda Civic. Since then we've made do with just the minivan. Unfortunately, this means that I do a heck of a lot of driving around all day: in the morning to drop off Daniel at school and Tab at work, and in the evening to pick them up. We've put off buying another car, because, frankly, we can't afford it right now. We're trying to save enough money so we can move from the city to a suburb where our kids can attend public school and actually receive an education, without worrying about being knifed.But worse than being a one-car family is being a no-car family, as we discovered today. 1:20 p.m. As we were driving up Route 1 to pick up Tab last night, Stephen asked "What's that smell?" I assumed he was referring to the exhaust fumes that always saturate that busy highway. Anyway, I was still slightly congested from my latest cold and couldn't smell anything. So I answered, "Probably fumes, honey," and instantly forgot about it. But when Tab came to the car, he smelled it, too. Not only that, he spotted antifreeze leaking out of the minivan. He figured we'd sprung a leak and hoped the leak would be somewhere accessible. He added some water as a stopgap measure, which got us home uneventfully. The garage we use offers 24-hour service. After Tab gave the boys their baths last night, he asked our neighbor, Vicki, to give him a ride home from the garage. We hoped it would be fixed this morning so Vicki could drop him off at the garage on her way to work; unfortunately, it turned out that the leak was in the head gasket, which is located in a particularly inconvenient location in Chrysler minivans. The part itself would not be expensive to replace, but we would be paying for about eight hours of labor to take the car apart and put it back together. And the car wouldn't be done until 2 in the afternoon. By the time we found this out, it was nearly 9 a.m., and we had no way to get Daniel to school. What's more, Matthew was feverish due to what I suspected was an ear infection, but I didn't want to set up an appointment at the pediatrician's until I knew I had a way of getting him there. Everyone we know who might have given us a ride was at work or school. Finally, Tab called his mother, who lives about 25 miles away. She arrived at 10:30, Tab took Daniel to school, and I made an appointment for Matthew for later this afternoon. It has been a bad day and an expensive week. In addition to the thousand dollars we will have to pay to get the minivan fixed, Tab just found out that it would cost him $550 to repair his most important camera lens. He's opted to purchase a brand new one for $750 instead of running the risk of using a repaired lens during one of the weddings he photographs. Tab is despondent because it seems like every time we start to get a little bit ahead, we get hit with some unforeseeable expense. I'm upset, too, but I'm more pragmatic. These things happen, unfortunately. Brooding about life's inequities does not change anything but only serves to make everyone around you miserable, too. Since I couldn't make everything magically all better, I did what I could: I baked chocolate chip cookies, Tab's favorite. Cookies don't change anything, but they seemed to cheer Tab up a teeny bit.
|