Big Mother

My folks are currently in Reno. (Or Reeeeeeeeeeeeno, as it's known to some.) They're there on a trip, celebrating, yep, count them, I know you won't, 50 years of wedded bliss. They're both so nutty. They're a perfect match.

I hope their trip goes well. I hope it goes a damn sight better than a trip I took some years ago.

See, when I was driving back to A Major Car Rental Company on Saturday to return Temporary Podmobile, I got to thinking about this little foray down south I took about 20 years ago. I remember telling you last week I'd never ever rented a car in my life. And that's still true, I hadn't. But I was involved in the act of someone else's renting a car.

Back during the mid-or-so-80s, when my cousin Jacob and I were thick as thieves, and my sister wasn't quite as rich as she is now and was therefore a lot freer and more fun, the three of us decided to take a weekend jaunt down to the Durham/Chapel Hill area. See, my folks were out of town, my sister's husband was out of town (this was pre-Taytie by several years), and Jacob really had no one to speak of to be in or out of town, and so we all decided to do a "bachelorettes on the town" kind of thing. We were going down to hang out, do some shopping, walking around, clubbing, and having general fun.

It was during the summer, it had to be because I remember it being very hot, and we all piled into Jacob's nameless automobile, a sky blue Ford Escort. (She was always disappointed her car hadn't acquired a name in the time she'd owned him.) And off we went.

About 10 or so miles outside of Durham, the Escort started having some problems. It decided, for some strange reason, that it didn't want to run anymore. Anytime Jacob got the car out of about 2d gear, it would die. We were on I-85, a busy little piece of concrete real estate indeed. And we were forced into going a top speed of around 31 miles an hour.

Now, we were young, and not the cool, calm, and collected people you see before you today. And so we were pretty panicked at the situation we were in, Jacob driving on the side of the road, her engine grinding, toodling along in the 30s while traffic was whizzing by us.

We finally made it to an exit that had a gas station with a garage, and so we inched our way towards it. (The uphill off-ramp was interesting.) We putted our way into the garage, only to be told that it was Saturday, and, well, people aren't supposed to have engine problems on Saturday, so we'd have to wait till Monday before anything could be done.

And we all had to be back home by Sunday night.

Now, remember the reason we were even on this trip - everyone we knew at home was gone elsewhere. Normally it wouldn't have taken more than a frantic call home to have someone on their way to haul our younger asses back to Virginia, but that was a luxury I'm afraid we didn't have this time. And so we did the only thing we knew to do. Pool our money and rent a car.

And that's just what we did.

And so someone at the garage gave us a ride to a local used car dealership where we were told we could get a rental - if anyone was there on a Saturday. But there they were, and Jacob and my sister went to the rental desk to do the honors.

After a while they came outside saying we had a car for the stay in town (which was growing shorter by the hour - we'd already wasted ½ of our two days standing and waiting) and also for the drive home. When Jacob's car was ready we could bring the rental back. We were happy and relieved - they were apparently "prepping" our rental and would drive it out to us shortly.

A lot of prepping. We waited about a half-hour, and finally, out came our rental. There was a short moment of silent staring disbelief, then the sound of three young women simultaneously bursting in hilarious fits of laughter.

Our car was a gigantic Chevrolet. I'm thinking it was a Caprice Classic. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was the biggest auto Chevrolet made at the time. It was probably about a 1982 model, approximately the size of a three-bedroom ranch style home, and was, well, to be perfectly honest in my description, a shit brown. It was magnificent in its heinousness.

We climbed inside, and it was really a shame there were only three of us because approximately 300 of us could have fit in, and started off to our hotel. There are things one notices about a car, and the first we noticed was that, here on this hot day, we had no air conditioning. We were supposed to, all the controls were there, we just didn't have any working. It wasn't until we were back on I-85 that we noticed we also had no speedometer to speak of. And when I say "to speak of," I mean, of course, we had none at all. Well, we had one, but it had no needle telling us how fast we were going.

It was very quickly that "the moment" came. I think it was as we were pulling into the parking lot of our hotel. My sister was the one who first uttered the phrase. "Here's the hotel. Now let's see if we can get this big mother in a parking space so we can get our room." And at once we all started to giggle. Big Mother. Never had a name so described a car. (And never will one.)

"Shit!" Jacob yelled. "I've had my car for five years, and it still doesn't have a name! We've been in this one 15 minutes and it's already got one!"

And so, for that weekend the three of us girls bonded with each other, all the while being intertwined with that huge turd-colored piece of metal, Big Mother. It's one of those things you just know is going to make you laugh years down the road, you're just not sure if you'll live that long. I mean, we laughed about it all that weekend, but it just didn't seem that funny while we were laughing, you know?

The trip home was fun, 4 hours of interstate driving with no speedometer. The windows, all four of them, were down, we had to yell at each other to be heard, and it was still hot enough to fry an egg on Big Mother's brown leatherette seats.

But she got us home, and even made it back for her return trip home to North Carolina.

Somewhere I have a photo of Jacob at the wheel of Big Mother. It's so old I don't know if I could ever find it now, but I'm tempted to look. It might make a great addition to Picture Sunday.

Oh, and after that trip, Jacob finally came up with a name for her sky blue Escort. L.B. L.B. stood for "Little Bastard." She traded him off not long after that. You'll never believe her choice - a brand new blue - Yugo. Who soon became Y.B. - Yugoslavian Bastard.

She was never lucky with cars, our Jacob....

Betland's Olympic Update:
* Well, the moment has arrived, and we have acrowinners. And so, what were yall worried about lately?
Honorable mention goes to Venice, aka bitterspice, with "You dented our neighbor's Subaru." Don't know why she'd worry, but I guess she's just the caring type.
Runner-up goes to DeepFatFriar with "Young Dervishes on noisy subways." Actually, you'd be surprised how I've been worrying about that lately.
And in a stunning move, a tie this week between Mike and - Mike? Yep, I generally try never to pick more than one entry per person, but he had two this week so good I just thought I'd let him tie himself. Which I'm sure he does at home anyway. And so...
Winner this week is Mike and Mike with "Young Dr Oppenheimer's nuclear studies," and "Yes doing only newer stuff." Actually, I worry more about the second than the first.
Thanks to all who played!