About 5 years ago, I was home from college for Thanksgiving, and my parents sent me out to shuttle my elderly Great-Aunts Mary and Virginia to our house for the annual feast. So I'm trucking down the street in my '76 Impala ... wait. hangon. i need to interrupt myself here ...
*moment of silence for '76 Impala. V8 engine; plaid vinyl seats; the relative size of a barge; only a two-door so that both doors were about 4 feet in length and approximately the same weight as a sperm whale (if i wanted to open the passenger door for someone whilst sitting in the driver's seat, i had to unbuckle my seatbelt and slide across the seat because i couldn't reach otherwise. (and let's not forget that i was already 5'9" in high school); no working radio, so i kept a tape player on the front seat, which for the most part played nothing but cassettes of Led Zeppelin, The Cure, and Toad the Wet Sprocket; the ashtray wasn't so much as a tray as a trough -- it pulled out perpendicularly from the dash and was about 4 inches wide and a foot long (i am not making this up. tell 'em, mom. and you too, paul. i think you had the privilege of riding in the impala) and could hold at least 200 cigarette butts.
This story falls under the category of Dumb Shit I Did In High School That I Never Told My Mother About. Ready, Ma?
so one day, my friend anthony breznican and i were driving down the road (just past parnassus, going towards sardis, near that driving range, mother) and we were both smoking cigarettes (i told my mother that i never smoked in high school. i lied, and realize now that she knew it all along) and i stubbed mine out in the ashtrough, which was by now overflowing with cigarette butts. brez did the same, and i shoved the ashtrough closed. it was a nice day, we had the windows open, and about five minutes later, brez says, 'hey, do you smell something burning?' i sniffed the air and said, 'hmm. yeah. it's probably just someone burning garbage,' to which he replied, 'then why is your dashboard smoking?' i looked down to see that smoke was billowing out of the ashtrough area, so i yanked it open. before my eyes was a pile of roughly 200 cigarette butts, the majority of which were smoldering. to make matters more interesting, some of the paper on the filters had ignited, producing low-level flames. brez and i were screaming, panicking, using the name of the lord in vain, and evoking various expletives. in retrospect, i realize that the smartest course of action would have been to pull over and deal with the problem, but for some reason i decided to keep driving. with the windows open, effectively providing our little bonfire with much-needed oxygen. after a struggle, brez managed to extract the giant ashtrough, leaned out the window, and hurled the contents of the inferno onto the road, all while we were trundling along at about 50 miles an hour. i looked in my rearview mirror to see a most impressive display of pyrotechnics, with bits of flame and soldering cigarette filters exploding in orange ash on the road. strangely enough, i opted not to tell my parents about the evening's events.*
Anyway, so Aunts Mary and Virginia were in the car with me, and they were commenting on some woman they knew who was married but (gasp!) hadn't changed her last name. Rather than to wisely follow Lindathemum's "sometimes it's better in the long run to just ignore it" principle, I elected to challenge their gereatric viewpoint, and told them that I had no intention of ever changing my last name if I got married. There was a stunned silence from the back seat for a few seconds, then Aunt Mary cried, "But Katy! What about the children???" in a manner that suggested that my refusal to change my last name would be approximately as psychologically damaging to children as, say, raising them along the Gaza Strip. I let the issue drop, and the two of them went back to arguing about the various appropriate chip-and-dobber configurations permitted at the weekly church hall Bingo game.
posted by Kate at 4:50 PM link/comments
