Miscellaneous, etc.

Or specifically, “Crunch.”

I smashed up my car yesterday morning. I sat down to write about it last night, but all I could think to say was, “Shit, I smashed up my car this morning. Now it’s going to cost me a lot of money. And my insurance is going to go up. And that’s going to cost me a lot of money. Shit. I smashed up my car this morning. That’s going to cost me a lot of money…” and so on.

On the up side, anyone doing a Google search for “cost me a lot of money” would immediately find my site; on the downside, grief and embarrassment are considerably less interesting in print than they are in person. Suffice to say, I smashed my car up yesterday morning, and it’s going to cost me a lot of money.

I mentioned recently that I had a phobia of the police, particularly when I’m driving. Most of that comes from the fact that when I was sixteen — two weeks after I’d gotten my driver’s license, and probably two days after I was insured — I wrecked my father’s station wagon while I was driving home from work. There was freezing rain, and I decided for some reason that I didn’t want to take the turn that was coming up on the road ahead, so I diverted off to a little side street. I don’t know why I thought it was the right thing to do, because in either direction the side street veered off into a 90° turn, but I was sixteen and more than a little panicky.

When I arrived at one of those 90° turns, the enormous back-end of my Dad’s station wagon started to fishtail, and I had no idea what to do. I think I must have slammed both feet on both pedals, because suddenly I was fishtailing a hell of a lot harder and there was a huge wooden pole coming up in front of me and I started screaming in a decidedly unmanful way and the car went crunch and I whacked my knees on the steering column and my head on the steering wheel.

Above: My beautiful car, looking like brand new. Hi, baby. I love you.

Below: My beautiful car, looking like I left it yesterday. I’m so sorry. So very very sorry.

People tell you that car accidents are scary, but really the most frightening moment is immediately afterwards, when everything is still. That’s when things aren’t happening to you any more, and the joystick’s been handed back to you. You are suddenly faced with a universe of possibilities, so very many of them unpleasant, and unless you have some kind of experience, you really don’t know what to do. Emotions take over. Irrational thoughts can sometimes take hold.

I, for example, felt that I had to turn off the car. The front end of it was wrapped around a huge wooden pole, the engine was not running any more, but it was in my head that I had to get the keys out of the ignition. Someone might steal them. Someone might take my Dad’s pewter keychain that looked just like our dog who died a few years before. He’d be really mad if that happened.

So I sat in the front seat, not really feeling my knees or my shoulders hurting, jiggling the keys in the ignition. It was cold outside, and dark. I didn’t want to look around the neighborhood and try to figure out what to do, I just wanted my Dad’s keychain back.

Finally I gathered the wits to walk up and knock on the door of the people whose telephone pole I smashed into. They were nice enough to let me use their phone, didn’t laugh at the terror in my voice when I phoned home, told me not to worry and that it’s happened to their front lawn more than a few times. Then my mother and father were there, and so was a police officer, asking me questions about how fast I was going and why I thought I’d be better off coming down this little street.

The cop pointed to the skid marks I’d left on the road, telling me that I wasn’t going the 60 km/h that I thought I was. I had ended up facing in the direction I came from, meaning that I’d hit the pole so hard that I ended up swinging around it. He looked at me sideways, and told me that he was glad I was wearing my seatbelt.

“That bad?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said in a tone that told me he was sharing a personal opinion, but that he was still an Authority Figure And Not My Friend Or Anything. “Yes, that bad. You’d be very badly hurt or worse if you hadn’t been wearing your seatbelt, so be glad for that.”

Everyone said that: You weren’t hurt, be glad, you didn’t hurt anyone, be happy. I looked at the wreck of my father’s car, dark and wet and sitting pathetically in a trail of sideways tire tracks, and I wasn’t glad.

Yesterday wasn’t that bad. It was in a lot of ways the opposite of that — it was sunny and cold, for example, instead of rainy and cold — and I hit someone else’s car instead of a stationary object. But watching my hood crumple up in front of me, feeling that same sense of disconnection and panic and anger, brought back a lot of memories.

And yet, thank God or my lucky stars or whatever you like. The woman I collided with didn’t get out of her car with a cut on her eye, or holding onto her broken arm in pain. For that matter, she didn’t launch through her windshield or crack her head on the steering wheel. Her dog didn’t break his leg falling off of his seat, her baby seat didn’t detach and go flying through one of the windows, her coffee didn’t spill into her lap and render her infertile.

I mean, she didn’t have a dog or a baby or coffee, but she might have. She could have been hurt, or enraged, or psychotic, or driving a Pinto, or been a lawyer — and instead she was just an exceptionally nice lady, who tsked in sympathy at the crushed front end of my car, and mourned the scratches on her bumper. After the police arrived, she invited me to sit in her van with her and her husband, and we talked about how they had come to Canada from Ireland, and British comedians, and women who had crazy ex-husbands. We exchanged information for insurance, and I realized that she was the mother of a girl I’d known in elementary and high school, and we started catching up with each other about what her daughter had been doing.

She kept her pen out, and wrote down a few details about where I was and what I was doing. “I know my daugher will ask,” she said, as she jotted down where I worked. “Might as well be ready.”

“You can tell her how we ran into each other at the Dairy Queen,” I said, and both she and her husband laughed with me. While she jotted down my policy number and my insurance carrier, I looked back over at my poor Accord, with its hood folded like a tent and its headlights spread out all over the road.

And it wasn’t so bad.

I mean, it was bad. I’m not happy. I would not want to do this every day of my life, but it was also not that bad. No blood on the pavement, no coffee on the groin, just money. Probably lots of money, but still — just money. And when my family and my friends and the lady and the tow truck guy were all telling me, “Be glad,” I actually understood what they were talking about.

I am glad. I’m glad that I screwed up and all it’s going to cost anyone (read: me) is money. And if that’s the only thing I’ve learned between sixteen and twenty-six, then I can’t be doing all that badly, can I?

Better than my car, anyway.