BrandiBlog

Back about 8 years ago I bought a brand-new silver Honda Civic.  I really loved that car.   It took me all over the damn place–work, shopping, vacations, bar hopping.  In fact, I drove that car to Mexico about a month after I bought it.  Of course, I wound up getting it stuck in the sand and had to get a tow from the Federali’s at 3 in the morning, had an ashtray full of wet cigarette butts spill in the backseat when I took a bumpy turn too quickly, and the floorboards were soaked in Tecate by the time I headed home from Rocky Point.  Had to break her in, ya know?

That poor car went through a lot.  I’m just kind of rough on vehicles that way.  In July of 2001 I was involved in a car accident in the Honda.  As a result of being sandwiched between an Altima and a Volvo on I-17, extensive body work had to be done to my poor Silver Bullet.  She was never quite the same after that.  In fact, for the next 16 months whenever I had a passenger in the back seat of my car I had to let them out by using the outside door handle because they were unable to open the door from the inside.  I just considered it a car scar from the accident.

Fast-forward to November of 2003.  My husband and I were just dating at the time and he and I went to my aunt’s house for Thanksgiving.  After the meal, we decided to go hang out with some of my friends who lived nearby.  We invited my cousin Sarah to come along.  When we arrived at the friend’s house I asked Matt to open the car door and let Sarah out from the back seat.  Matt asked, “Why doesn’t your car door open from the inside?”  I explained to him how my car had never been the same since the accident and that as a result there was the door dilemma.  He looked at me like I was a bit touched in the head and asked, “Are you sure that it’s from the accident and not just the baby lock?”

The baby lock?  What the hell was a baby lock???

Matt reached into the inside panel of the car and flipped a little switch that I never knew existed.  The baby lock.  And TA-DAH!!!!  The door opened from the inside.  I felt a little nauseated.  Here I had been chauffeuring drunk friends around for almost a year and a half, always having to run around the outside of the car to let them out from the backseat, and all that was wrong was that somehow this mysterious “baby lock” had been flipped to the lock position.  It was a truly humbling blonde moment.

To this day, I still get teased about the baby lock.  Ah, some things my husband will never let me forget.   But it sure is a good thing that I met him.  Otherwise I never would have known about the baby lock.  And I’d probably still be driving that Civic and cursing the accident that caused her back door to only be opened from the outside.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 4:08 pm and is filed under Family, Friends, Life, cars. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.