The Family Car

My mother is known for her impractical and often ridiculous choices. She makes them in the hope of impressing people, neighbors, bystanders, all in all, people she doesn’t know, but whom opinion she cares a great deal about. That my father went along with her choices is another proof that they both truly deserved each other.

At the time of purchase, my brother and I were both in our teenage. My brother was involved in several organized sports and required rides to and from wherever, several times a week. Each sport involved bags of equipment and usually team mates who also had bags of equipment. Although I was more self-reliant, there were times when I desperately needed a ride home. My mother was then working at a popular college downtown. Over the years she provided free rides to most of the neighboring kids, except for me, for she had had enough by the time I started college. Thankfully I had already turned sixteen and by then, purchased my own car. Still, we both left home at about the same time in the morning, returning, at first, at about the same time at night. Freedom of transportation, however, soon allowed for less rigid return times which I took full advantage of.

Naturally, the wise choice for a family car would have been to acquire a spacious and solid four-door sedan with a large trunk, a safe car where everybody could have been comfortably seated. But my mother never considers others. Her vision is limited to her own needs and desires. Instead she insisted on a two-door grey Camaro with red leather interior and a huge eagle on the hood. That car had a big V8 engine which she never drove faster than 50 km/h, even on the highways. As a matter of fact, she even managed to get a ticket for impeding the flow of traffic…

Sit by a gorgeous woman for an hour and it will feel like a minute, sit on a hot stove for one minute and it will feel like an hour, said Albert Einstein while explaining the theory of relativity. Sit with my family in a confined space for a month and you will understand the true meaning of eternity. At some point during the time we owned that racing car, my mother decided that the entire family would go on a road trip down to Florida. In the middle of winter, four people, none who spoke English, two heavy smokers, one asthmatic (me), one over six feet tall (my brother), a large cooler on the back seat between the children, no back windows, two doors and four weeks later, we hated each other with pure raging passion which lasted to this day.