Beloved Betsy: The Wreck and the Empty Parking Space

You always think when you love someone madly that you'll have a funny inexplicable feeling in your gut when something's happened to them, no matter how minor. Well, I didn't. Maybe I have a lazy sixth sense, or maybe it was haywire during my third pregnancy.

Around 7:30am one August morning in 2007, just a few days after My Man's birthday, the telephone rang. I answered immediately, certain it was not a telemarketer at such an hour, thinking perhaps that Matthew needed to tell me he'd forgotten something or that I shouldn't forget to call and make such and such an appointment....

"Hello?"

"Honey, I don't want you to worry," said Matthew's voice. "I've been in a car accident, but I'm fine."

I didn't know how to respond. A swell of emotion and confusion had followed those words: car accident.

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"Except for some burns on my arm from the airbag."

He briefly told me that Betsy had not fared as well. There had been sudden braking on the freeway, the domino effect as each car attempted to avoid hitting the car in front. Successful attempts ended with the van behind my husband; it slammed into the rear of Matthew's car, propelling it forward under the SUV directly ahead. Betsy's front end folded up like a paper bag, the air bags bloomed and burst, and the chemicals from the airbag left nasty burns on Matthew's arm. The paramedics gave him some ointment for it, but, thankfully, with no casualties or gravely serious injuries, they fled off to the next scene of rush hour catastrophe. Matthew was stranded at the side of a busy highway, wondering how he'd get to work.

Next time I heard from him he had hitched a ride with a police officer to a gas station. He ended our conversation abruptly when he saw an associate from his company. I heard him call the gentleman's name over the noise of car's engines, and then he told me he loved me, and he'd check in later.

The realization of what could have happened and how lucky we were didn't strike just then. I felt as if I was in limbo. Matthew was okay, thank God, but shaken; Betsy was in bad shape. I roamed around the house with no purpose, restlessly waiting for that next phone call, explaining now and then to our two young children that Papa had been in a car accident, but he was alright.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Everyone told Matthew he needed to take the day off, go home, and work out all the little details thrust upon a person after a sudden event spins life around on the great roulette table of trouble. Matthew finally conceded; he was already spending most of his time on the phone with our insurance company. So I headed north across town with Berto and Ana to pick him up in our minivan. From there we drove to the tow yard where they'd taken Betsy..

I wasn't prepared to see the wreckage. Couldn't comprehend before hand how I'd feel. After many long moments talking to the individuals at the tow yard providing proof of ownership and figuring out just where they had hauled Betsy to, they opened the gate for us and Matthew slowly drove down the center of a wide, full lot of wrecked vehicles. That's when I was hit with the realization that, as King Solomon said, " time and chance happens to us all". Matthew turned the van between two surreal rows of mangled cars and braked.

"There she is," he said.

She was to our left. I saw her, and the sight of her hit me hard; I finally understood from her sad state just what had occurred that morning while Matthew was inside her. Intercepted by the emotion I'd seen in my periphery all day, my full pregnant body shook with it as I stared at Betsy - bent, maimed, compacted...wrecked.

Matthew got out and opened her driver's side door for the last time, collecting CDs, old key rings, papers...finally her dented license plate. A Journey CD played on my van's radio as I watched him and cried. I was remembering life with Betsy - remembering lunch dates to our favorite Chinese restaurant when Matthew and I were first dating, remembering late night conversations and kissing sessions beneath her sun roof that lay open to the stars as her radio serenaded us, remembering carefree trips to San Antonio's River Walk when we were first married without kids, and recalling longer trips to New Mexico and Idaho when her interior was so crammed with kiddie stuff and luggage and Christmas gifts, there was barely room for us and our kids to move. Though the kids and I had long since moved our mobile selves from Betsy to the roomier minivan, I was remembering our life thus far in that sporty little car and how it had unfolded, and I was mourning her future absence from it.

The kids were troubled by my crying as we waited and also fascinated at seeing Papa's car in this strange form and place, so I tried to explain why I was sad and how immensely grateful I was that Betsy, and not their Papa, had sustained most of the injury.

When Matthew returned to the van, I looked back as we drove away from Betsy until we turned and I could no longer see her, and I knew I wouldn't see her again. I held her battered license plate in my hands.

When we pulled into our driveway at home that afternoon, Matthew laid Betsy to rest so abruptly that I was shocked: instead of going left into the van's usual designated parking space, he purposefully drove right up the middle, partially in the van's space and partly in Betsy's.

"Oh, Matthew..." I said in distress, my voice catching. "Right in the-the middle? That's...not...r-right!"

And then I sobbed.

Matthew had said his goodbye in the wreckage yard, for I was mystified by the calm in his voice when he replied.

"She's gone," he said firmly but gently. "It's time to move on."

And so we have.

Short post: Heat and Scorpions

It was 108 degrees at 9pm the other evening, and I've been telling people this summer seemed milder than most.

Do you think that's the test, then? You've finally got the mettle to stay in Arizona if a summer that's about to break a record for the most days over 110 degrees qualifies as "a mild year" in your book? Perhaps I'm smitten with this place. Maybe I'm just grateful I don't live in Yuma, Arizona. Or maybe I have heat poisoning of the brain. I did walk outside on a 116 day and say casually to my husband, "This is not so bad."

Crying out loud, I was defending the furnace that viciously persecutes mankind in these parts for four + months every year! Why, I don't know. The only thing I've ever gotten from it was a chocolate bar. How? By leaving a bag of Ghiradelli chocolate chips in my car while I shopped. I came out to a bag of liquid chocolate. I put it in the freezer when I got home, and voila! Scrumptious chocolate bar!

All this heat is making me uncomfortable, though. It's making me itch. Not literally, no. But mentally. I read in the paper that local hospitals had received a record number of phone calls about scorpion bites last month because of this heat. When temperatures get so high, even the bugs haul their buns inside looking for a cold beer. And who follows the bugs? Why their natural predator, the scorpion!

I know so many people who have gotten bitten in their beds, just out of the shower, outside....mostly in their beds....that I have a sense of inevitability about meeting a scorpion's stinger one day. It feels like fate, a fate I am anxiously tryin not to think about, but a fate I can't avoid much longer. With each fresh story I hear from friends and acquaintances about their painful encounter with that aggressive arachnid, I can feel my time coming, coming.....

If I crawl into bed at night without shaking out the sheets, I lie there taut, legs together, toes curled, arms pressed against my midsection, waiting to feel...well, what that stinger will feel like. It's much nicer just to shake out the sheets and inspect under the pillows, flipping them over in case a scorpion is hiding on the back side, snickering behind its pincers and thinking about how freakishly funny its going to be when he stings me on my neck.

I escaped my fate once. I reached into a diaper bag at the home of Matthew's grandmother. A small scorpion crept out after my hand, and I screamed and leaped back. Grandma forked the scorpion and thrust it down the garbage disposal. The crunch of that disposal is something that still haunts me today. "Well, that's taken care of," she said staunchly. Ah, Grandma - she was made for the desert. On her property that bordered BLM land, she dealt with rattlesnakes and javelinas, too.

I'm here in more urbanized desert, but still the desert, and I've been here nine years. Heaven help me, I'm convinced there's a scorpion waiting for me somewhere, sometime soon. And if we break a record this summer for highest lows and most days over 110, I just know I'm going to wander into my kitchen one of these late nights, find a scorpion on my counter eating crickets and sipping a cool beer, and he'll look me right in the eye as he uncurls his tail and says slowly, "I've been waiting for you..."

Gulp.

Mow down your sadness, take pleasure in growing things

I was supposed to be somewhere else on Saturday, or, rather, on the way to somewhere else. With my four kids and my handsome man, I was meant to be driving north through Arizona toward Nevada. On Sunday, we were to meet family in Idaho - a whole lot of family including my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles on both side, a slew of cousins, my beautiful sister's family, and my brother Nate and his wife Natalie who would be there from England.

Instead on Saturday I was home thinking about all the family in Idaho. Plans had changed for reasons we could not have anticipated, and we would not be joining my family for this reunion. Though I understood that it was not best for our family to travel, I was sad and restless. I tried to keep busy, My man and I hatched a last minute plan to switch our kids' rooms around. Unfortunately, that whole project only messed up the house and unsettled me more. From that project I leapt into laundry and picking up, vacuuming and sweeping, hauling out trash and recycling, but eventually I had to give vent to my feelings in words. Noises of discontent I had already spread around our home like wicked fertilizer set to increase unhappy feelings. But I wanted the harvest to be clear.

"I hate this day!" I blurted out.

Then I cried.

I know that people used to head west in America a hundred plus years ago, and they would never see family again. That story has played out all over the world all throughout time when families have migrated. If you got news about how loved ones' lives were going, you thanked God for that small comfort, I suppose. But nowadays, if you get along with your family, you expect to see them at regular intervals, and Facebook doesn't count.

There were many things I wanted from this vacation. I wanted to introduce my Ella Belle to my grandparents, because she is the only one of my children they have yet to meet. I wanted to see my kids run around like little rapscallions with my sister Vinca's children, wanted them to experience camping together. I wished to talk with my brother Nate, because I see him now so little I feel that England has a larger claim to him than I have, and I can't remember the last time we had a long conversation about our lives. I hoped to spend plenty of time with my parents. I wanted to laugh with my relatives and eat good food together. And I yearned to raid a storage unit in Boise where tapes of my Dad's music repose in dust and dark, to snatch those tapes and gloat over my victory in salvaging them.

But the practical details of life sometimes crowd out the hopes or, if we're lucky, replace them with new ones.

I found an opportunity to make peace with my disappointment that evening. I concentrated on one of those practical little details of life. I got into holey jeans and tight, sundried sneakers that had been left on the patio too long, donned my sunglasses, and went out my back door to mow the lawn.

And that's when my sadness and I settled things. We mowed that grass together. It was work, but all things are better when you can see the green world. Better yet when you can smell, see and touch it. We began awkwardly but soon found our rhythm - pacing to and fro, backing up over stubborn clumps of vegetation, and chasing over small lowlands of dirt and patchy places more populated by pebbles than Bermuda grass. We squinted at the lawn to look for strips we'd neglected while the sun shone straight into our pupils from the west. And we smelt the sweet smell of freshly cut grass with each new swath of shortened blades. That smell was like balm, the incense for my meditation with disappointed hope.

When my job was done, not too exquisite but fine, I brought out my toddler son to walk on his little bare feet through the lawn with me, pointing out what Mama had accomplished.

Then we took a picture of our sumac tree's beautiful branches struggling beneath the August sun, and we went to inspect my pots of mini roses that are among the elite few flowers that I have succeeded in keeping alive and blooming.   My sadness didn't leave me as I roamed about my yard. It didn't fall away to nestle in the fluffy piles of grass clippings, content to decompose and grow into something new. But it did settle down and find peace, no longer struggling against reality. And that's a blessing.

Painted Desert Sky (no words)

The Dentist's Spa

You're at the dentist, he's drilling in your tooth. Your face is being sprayed by water and bits of broken tooth and filling as the assistant rinses out your mouth, and your chanting mentally to yourself, "I've been through labor; this is not real pain" over and over again, because they didn't get you fully numbed.

You listen to the hum of the drill start and stop, start and stop, and then you sit up periodically, so they can clamp a big ugly mold full of mushy putty in you mouth. You sit there silently with teeth glued together for several moments, the handle of the mold sticking out of your mouth as if you were some bizarre sculpture with a politically-charged message, and you watch the airplanes flying by in the distance from east to west one right after the other, because your dentist's office faces a prominent flight path. It's your only entertainment, because you refuse to get up and read that magazine with an article about Charlie Sheen's deranged, soul-depleting life.

Still, its quiet in the office. You're alone here without your four little munchkins, and people are taking care of you. The dentist is filing down your tooth for its crown, and he hasn't reproached you once for the fact that you broke it on a cookie. His assistant is gently wiping your mouth with wet paper towels, as if you were a child, in order to remove the gunky putty from the mold. You don't have to do a thing except pay a few hundred dollars at the end of your appointment. It's like a spa day, you think to yourself, where they file down your teeth instead of your nails, and they slap clay in your mouth instead of on your face, and they make small talk that sends you into a kind of peaceful trusting trance.

Until they wish you good day and send you forth with a swollen mouth and odd taste in it, unable to talk clearly as you pick up your responsibilities by the door, hoist them over you shoulders and head out into the brutal heat of the day to join your scuttling fellow humans.

Beloved Betsy: Road Trips, Driver's Ed, and Labor Coach

Betsy, My Man's classy 1998 Acura Integra, got stripped, humiliated, and in the end the guilt, like rotten egg, could be found on my face. Obviously, I didn't intentionally enable the theives who hoisted her up on Matthew's car jack late one night and robbed her of everything they could remove quickly. Still, I had my opportunity to stop them and I squandered it.

It taught me a lesson, though. Now I bug the police about silly stuff just to be on the safe side - "uh, yes...I would like to report a vehicle that's been blocking my mailbox for twenty minutes. It's very suspicious..."

Once Betsy came home to us from the repair shop, pieced back together with new factory parts - her old self only shinier, she played a major part in our lives for six more years. She made multiple trips to Albuquerque with us while Matthew's Kiss CDs blared from her stereo, and I marveled at the barren land that is west Texas between chapters in my book. She was hitched behind a moving truck when we made the long uncomfortable move in July from Texas to Arizona in a U-Haul with broken air conditioning, my pregnant body hyperventilating in the hellish heat that enveloped us as we descended into Phoenix. In mid-September she and Matthew met me at hospital doors, a baby seat wedged in the back seat to welcome our first baby, a boy.

Less than two years later, I was pregnant with a daughter. Before she was born I determined to get a driver's license. That meant I must learn to drive, and as Betsy was our only car, it was left to her and Matthew to teach me. Such grinding of gears and screeching of tires had never before been heard in the parking lots of Phoenix! Betsy's moans and groans of protest kept Matthew in a state of constant stress as he periodically petted her dashboard soothingly. At me he mostly yelled.

"Ease up, Woman!" he'd exclaim.

"Watch the clutch!"

"Slow down on the turn!"

"Stop grinding my gears!"

"What are you doing to my car!?!"

Worst of all was my absolute terror of hills while driving that stick shift. I marveled at the ease with which Matthew let out the clutch and eased in the gas on even the steepest hill, going miraculously and smoothly forward instead of sliding back into the car behind, and all without a bead of sweat on his handsome brow. There were a few times, I confess, when I whigged out completely on an incline coming off the freeway, once even begging Matthew to take over in my rampant panic.

"We're in traffic - just get it together and go!" he cried

The driving lessons weren't good for the health of any of us, so Matthew sent me to driving school with a bunch of listless teenagers to learn to drive an automatic. I would never attempt to drive Betsy again, and she liked me the better for it.

I found a way to permanently leave my mark on Betsy's passenger side, however. On the race to the hospital to give birth to Ana, our first daughter, I had one whopping killer of a contraction and looked about wildly for something to bite. (I don't curse while in labor; I bite.) It would have been most unsafe to rip my husband's hand from the steering wheel for that purpose, so I wrenched down the sun visor from above me and sank my jaws into it with all the unholy force of my pain.

"No, no, no...not the visor!" said Matthew in shock, his eyes wide and pleading as his hands reached out instinctively to protect it. "Not the visor, honey....please...you're bending it..."

I gave him a look that would strike terror into the heart of any man who found himself alone with a half-crazed laboring woman, and the words died on his lips. He watched despairingly as I brutally twisted Betsy's visor between my teeth and hands with each fresh contraction, his hand involuntarily reaching out toward it in a silent and unheeded plea for mercy.

That visor would never be the same. I broke its metal rod in the act of transferring my pain to it, and an ugly gash rent its upholstery. Matthew patched it up as best he could, but it would always hang limp and crooked thereafter, the metal peeking out dejectedly now and then like a sullen relation reminding us of my blatant mistreatment of it.

Still, Betsy was there for me when I needed her, whether she wanted to be or not. It's part of her legacy, and I will never be allowed to forget that thanks to Matthew's diligence in telling the story.

It's because of such strong memories that I found it so hard to let go of Matthew's car when the time came. But the time to let Betsy go would come....in a distressing and unexpected way.

Beloved Betsy: The Infamous Midnight Raid (Revised)

When Matthew read this piece, he realized right away I had made some errors. He was very kind about it, but I laughed at the obvious mistakes I'd made. First of all, I had semi-quoted the policeman as saying thieves wanted Acuras for their hubcaps. Well I grinned at the stupidity of that once I realized what I'd said. It's the rims, of course! Hubcaps? Why, my siblings and I used to use hubcaps to slide down the big hill in Tennessee on a snowy afternoon!

Lastly, Matthew could not lower Betsy off the jack until the tow driver came, because there was nothing to lower her onto. That was a very touching respectful thing for him to do, I felt, but as My Man pointed out, the brutes had taken her rims and tires; she would have been resting on her axels. Well, well, I've corrected these foolish details in the telling, and its a much better story. May it now pay proper tribute to the memory of Betsy the Acura.

The night was perfect for what was about to transpire. A fine mist fell and would not let up, and a dense fog steamed up from the pavement, spread and pressed against the windows like a Christmas Eve ghost trying to impart a warning before morning.

Christmas was still a few days away, and I was up by myself wrapping presents to ship to family. The small apartment living room was dark except for the eerie blinking of the Christmas tree lights as I wrangled so ungracefully with the wrapping paper. The gifts were going to look like junk, not because they were or because of my bad eyesight, but because I had and have no sense of proper presentation.

It was after midnight when I became aware of the noise. It startled me, and I feel sure it had been going on for some time before my weary brain sounded the alarm. Ding, ding, ding! my brain was saying, Pay attention, Dopey! That's coming from outside, and something's not right... 

I crawled, yes crawled to the window (I'm no hero, sadly), and I inched up the blinds, stuck my eyeballs in the gap over the windowpane, and tried with all my might to pierce the thick fog.

Eventually I could perceive two shapes out by the curb where residents' cars were parked. One was moving around and indistinct. The other was kneeling by a car's front left tire, working to pry it off or put it back on. Which I could not tell, but I was struck by the guy's nice slacks or corduroys and his striped sweater - certainly not suitable attire for working on a vehicle.

I eased the window covering down, moved away from the window, and started pacing by the partially wrapped presents. Why were there two men out working on a car after midnight? Should I wake Matthew and let him know about the odd scene? What if they were the brothers or friends of the young college girl upstairs and were there because her car had broken down? Maybe she needed it to go home for Christmas break, and that was why they had come at such a weird hour. But what if they were thieves, and I should call the police? But if I did, and it was all innocent?

I paced and I stopped, scooted to the window, wondered at the proceedings outside and the cacophony of strange noises, and paced again. After staring out through the fog and the mist one last time and finding that the well-dressed boy had gone, but the vibrations of strange activity remained to taunt my ears, I finally fled to the bedroom and shook My Man forcibly.

"Honey, I don't know what it is, " I puffed when he finally turned blurry eyes on me. "It could be nothing, but there's something going on outside the window. Can you come look?"

He tumbled out of the bed and thumped out to the living room.

"What?" was all he muttered as he stumbled to the front window blinds and forced them aside. I wanted to yell, "No, we'll be seen!" but I answered instead:

"There were two guys out there by a vehicle. One was kneeling by a tire. I wasn't sure if they were working on it or not....you know, like for the girl upstairs or something..."

"There's no one out there now," said Matthew unconcernedly, moving the blind this way and that to cast his gaze around. "I'm going back to bed."

"Oh, al-alright," I stuttered stupidly as I went to look more boldly out the window and found that, as he had said, all was quiet.

My sense of unease didn't evaporate with the noise, however, but unlike certain brave creatures I know, I was not tempted to go outside and make sure all was right.

I unplugged the Christmas lights and went to bed. But despite the quiet that then reigned as I stared at the ceiling, I knew I had ignored the toll of warning in my brain, the plea of the pressing fog, the tightening in my gut that is the instinctive reaction to danger, and the evidence of my eyes on a dark night before Christmas.

I didn't know that I had failed to save Betsy.

*************************

My Man kissed me goodbye on his way to work, opened the front door and walked around the corner. Then he said something I had never heard him say before, not one time.

"Oh, f--k!"

My heart constricted. I knew what it meant, and I met him at the door.

"They stripped it!" he said, his eyes wild. "Somebody stripped my car. Call 911."

It wasn't until the police came that I truly examined the damage to Betsy. Matthew had been pacing around her continually, unable to settle his anger. We both shook the policeman's hand rather jerkily as he stepped up to where Betsy rested in the undignified state the thieves had left her.

The thugs had broken into her cab and trunk, had utilized Matthew's own jack to lift her, had stripped her of all four tires and rims, had stolen all of Matthew's CDs, had made off with his tool box, and they had dismantled the steering column. The steering wheel looked like a broken bone as it lay separated from its column; its wires hung out in a mangled mess. The bare fact that they had used his own tools against his car infuriated Matthew. I was surprised he could speak so clearly with the policeman about it. For me it was a bizarre and sad spectacle to see Betsy's dark green body propped up at a funny angle by Matthew's car jack, her opposite side resting on the spare tire where the thieves had laid it flat on the ground. 

Matthew circled Betsy with the policeman, talking to him in a strange high-pitched voice and gesturing passionately at all the damage the thieves had inflicted on his car.

"You're lucky," said the policeman kindly but calmly. "They tried to steal it." He casually pointed inside Betsy's window. "That's why your steering column's busted up. If they hadn't bungled it, it'd have been very unlikely we'd find it. At least for a while. They'd take it somewhere else to strip it of its parts. Maybe leave it by the side of a road somewhere."

That made me cold. The idea that Betsy could have been carted off to heaven knows where, all her valuable parts chopped up to be sold, strangers to her history passing her on a secluded country road somewhere, wondering at the skeletal remains of her frame.

Matthew and I both became aware of a truck in the next block of apartments. Its driver was pulling out slowly from the parking area, gazing on our scene with a curiosity, or smugness even, that was indecent. I gave him a hard unfriendly stare, and Matthew and I both glared after him as he finally increased his speed and moved away.

"I saw them," I spoke up then to the policeman. "I mean, at least one of them. I didn't know what they were doing. I could kick myself for not calling you guys like I should have. But I couldn't see what they were up to. It was so foggy..."

"Yep, it was a perfect night for it," the officer interrupted. "Thieves love nights like last night. Bad weather helps conceal their activity."

That makes sense," I said, and I thought about how I could not even see Betsy's dark green exterior when I'd looked out the window. "I couldn't see exactly what they were doing. I didn't know it was our car. I thought it was the girl's from upstairs. Like somebody was changing a tire for her. Just the way the guy was dressed..."

The officer's eyes moved from Betsy back to a clipboard in his hand on which he was writing a detailed report. He didn't ask me to elaborate.

"I know what the guy looked like," I said a little desperately. "Do you want me to describe him?"

"Sure," he said, flipping a page. I got the feeling he was humoring me.

"Okay, well...he had blond hair and looked like a college-aged guy. He had on light colored pants like khakis, maybe, or corduroys. Oh, and a red-striped sweater. The clothes he was wearing were too nice to be working on a car, you know?"

The policeman nodded as he finished putting down my description. A few minutes later he handed Matthew a sheet of paper.

"You'll need a copy of my report for the insurance," he said.

"Thank you," said Matthew as he stared at the paper detailing all that was missing or damaged on Betsy.

"You know," I began again, doggedly. "I think that young guy really was wearing khakis. And he seemed tall. Thinnish. Not too skinny, but not big, either. Medium build, I guess, and his hair was definitely blond. And for some reason I feel like he lives in this complex. Do you think that's likely?"

"It's possible," said the officer. "Or he knows someone who lives here. Acura Integras are popular cars with thieves. Believe it or not, for their rims too, actually. They've obviously seen it parked here before and knew where to find it."

"How likely is it that you'll get them?" inquired Matthew, his voice strained.

The officer looked back at us for a moment, and we could read in his eyes what he soon said in words.

"It's not likely," he said flatly. "If we had caught them red handed..." he shrugged. "But even then, they could have fled before we got here. We mainly fill out the reports for insurance purposes for the victim."

There wasn't much to say after that. The officer kindly wished us well, we thanked him, and then he left. We turned away from Betsy in her awkward, exposed state, and Matthew called his work and our automobile insurance provider. But once those necessary tasks were completed, there was nothing left to do but think about what had happened, and Matthew was forced to confront his feelings beneath the anger.

I won't disrespect my husband by attempting to describe what he felt then or how he worked through it. My part was simple. I sat by him and listened to what he had to say and tried to commiserate as best I could, and I felt myself sadly lacking. He didn't want to hear that it was my fault, that I should have called the police the night before, that I was so very sorry. What was done was done.

Now we simply had to get past it and move on - "It is what it is," my husband would say. There was still a future for Matthew, Betsy, and me. And many better experiences to come.