Drive 'em Till They Smoke!

There are a couple of idioms, both involving straws, that point to fairly insignificant events all by themselves, but when added on top of a bunch of other events, are enough to push us over the edge. "It was the last straw," we say in desperation, or "It was the straw that broke the camel's back." I'm not sure why it's always straws.

Regardless, that happened to me two days ago. Here I was, minding my own business on a crisp, October morning. I jumped in my van to head to the Trax station to ride downtown and teach my one Friday class, but before I even got out onto 80th, my front right tire went totally flat, as in I was completely down on the wheel. I barely made it over to the side of Angel St. Shulamith was planning to meet me at Trax to collect her child, so I called her and told her to pick us up first.

And that little event right there turned out to be the proverbial last straw.

To backtrack, we are known for driving our cars until they smoke. Sometimes literally. If I'm gonna pay interest on something, I'm gonna get my money's worth. We once had a Volkswagen Fox, a tiny car with just four seats. As I drove out of the parking lot of Luke's kindergarten one day, a huge cloud of black smoke arose from the front hood. Yep, the car was toast. I happened to be pregnant with Isaiah at the time, and this little car with four seats would not accommodate a family of five anyway, so that very day, we bought our first minivan.

It is with pride that I tell you how that very minivan is the car Isaiah used when he was 15 and took driver's ed. It didn't actually ever smoke, but near the end of its life, I had to carry gallon milk jugs filled with water and stop every few hundred yards to add that water to keep the engine from overheating. As the frigid Billings winter approached, we decided it was time to cave and replace our perfect van, which we owned for 15 years.

This we did with my 2004 Oldsmobile Silhouette, the car that got the flat tire two days ago. I've had it 14 years. It's been lots and lots of places. Shulamith and I drove it from Billings to Portland at least twice. Gerald drove it to Dallas, so Isaiah and his friends could attend QuakeCon, a giant computer LAN party. I've delivered kids to school, to piano lessons, to friends' houses, and Eli used it to pick up all his friends in the wee hours of weekday mornings for seminary. 

Oh how we have loved our van, but with over 180,000 miles, one by one, things malfunctioned. For several years, the automatic windows haven't worked, so I just don't use them. Ever. The most annoying part of this is driving through food places (which I do literally every day) and having to drive way forward past the window and then open my whole door to both pay and get the food. The sliding doors stick, so it takes two hands and a hefty tug to open them. The rear turn signals haven't worked forever, making me terrified when I drive at night that someone is going to rear end me. Recently the speedometer quit working; it shows me doing 110 mph pretty much all the time.

So that flat tire Friday morning was very much the last straw, in a series of straws, that ultimately broke the poor camel's back.

Not that I would have been brave enough to go buy a car on my own. Keep in mind I don't do this often. I find it terrifying! But Shulamith (aka Olivia Pope) was on it. She looked online and found a car she knew I would love, a crossover between a minivan and a small SUV. It's important to me to have a car that, if needed, would seat the seven Erichsen-Websters, even though it isn't often we have all seven of us in a car together. It had to be the easiest sale this cute 21-year-old saleskid ever had. I looked at the car Shulamith found, drove it up and down the street, told him what payment I wanted, and within 20 minutes, was signing papers.

Hoping to drive it till it smokes.