Constance, Totalled
She was a 1990 Camry. Cranberry in color. Stale old-car smell, with a sort of sweet-spicy overlay from a scented candle I stuck in the pocket in the driver-side door in a half-assed effort to combat stale old-car smell. One headlight not working. Antenna broken off. Needed axle work, needed brake work--and had for some time. Didn't maintain speed going up even unassuming hills. Badly needed to be washed. She was my first car. I loved her.
It was midday on a Sunday, on the way back from the grocery store, Cassie in her car seat in the middle of the back seat (when Cass was still a tenant of my uterus, Pete studiously read up on optimal car seat placement--central is safest). Pete is forever taking "shortcuts," which of course, in stereotypically wifely fashion, I reserve the right to privately consider "longcuts." But on this day, I thought, what the hell. Maybe I should try to cut through, here. Taking Main Road 1, as I always do, is somewhat the long way around. By a tiny bit, but still. So I tried it. But I botched it, missing the crucial second turn on the little side street, thinking it was too soon for it. So I ended up sailing past and having to turn onto Main Road 2, the one that runs by the other end of our little street. Well, whatever. I'd wasted 5 minutes at most, no biggie. Cassie was starting to get a little restive, but we were really really almost home. 4 blocks, 3 blocks...
For some reason, from Main Road 2, I always want to turn left onto Little Street J, one block too early, so I have to pay attention and make sure I wait to get to Little Street A. So there we were, there was Little Street J coming up, and I didn't want that one... WHOA! HEY! [swerve, brake] BANG. A light blue American car (not an SUV, thank goodness) was making a left-hand turn onto Main Road 2 from a little side street on my right and for some reason was undeterred by the presence of oncoming traffic. Which is to say, me.
After a split second of denial that this just actually happened, followed by a fleeting thought that maybe if I just drove home as if nothing had happened, the day could just go on normally, I snapped to and realized that I had been knocked into the oncoming lane and should probably at least move my car out of the way of traffic. So I gingerly stepped on the gas and eased us into Little Street J (which of course I'd been trying to avoid) and pulled over. By this time, Cassie was crying hard. We'd been jolted, but it didn't seem like we'd been jolted that hard. I could just feel the slightest ache across my collarbone, where I'd been thrown against the seatbelt, and that was all. So it didn't seem as though Cass, strapped down into her padded car seat, should have been hurt too badly. But still. Maybe she had bitten her tongue? I got out and opened the back door and leaned in to try to figure out what the bawling was about. Cassie finally calmed down enough to be intelligible--"Broken!" she was wailing. "It's broken!" She was worried about the car.
The light blue car, airbags deployed, windshield broken, front end crumpled, pulled in in front of my car, and the driver got out. He was in his late 40s, maybe, early 50s, with an almost Californian post-hippy look--longish hair and tradesman clothes and a little bead necklace. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" he said. He had a thick local accent. He said he was hurrying home to get the car to his wife, who had to go somewhere. He said he'd driven a school bus for 15 years and never had an accident. He said the car had been his father's, and he'd inherited it when his father died 2 years ago. He talked about how shaken and upset he was, and he thought he was having a heart attack (which he quickly clarified was just a joke when I looked up with flared nostrils and what must have been a slightly alarmed, how-much-CPR-do-I-remember? expression on my face). He apologized some more.
Being a relatively new driver, I had just a vague notion that now we were supposed to "exchange information," but my thoughts were all blowing around in shreds, and refused to coalesce into anything more helpful than that. He got out his license and proof of insurance and laid them on my hood. I didn't know what I was looking for. I copied down his name and address, and he gave me his phone number. License plate number? Insurance company? Policy number? VIN? Not so much. I'm just lucky that he was an honest guy and not an asshole. It turned out that it was actually his father's name on the paperwork I was looking at, so I didn't even have his name right. But we agreed that we'd talk by phone in about an hour, after we'd both calmed down a bit, and then got in our cars and limped home. And sure enough, he called me, and we did a more thorough job of exchanging information on the telephone--it turned out that he'd been at least as flustered and not substantially more experienced in these things than I, never having had an accident himself, so he'd been kind of stumped too.
My first impulse was to minimize what had happened. When I told Pete about it, I characterized it as a "little" accident, "not that bad." He went out to look at the damage and came back in looking kind of serious. It was actually pretty bad, he said. I had to sit on the couch and cry a little bit. I didn't really know what I was crying about, exactly. I mostly just wanted it to go back to being a normal Sunday. (Fortunately, Cassie was by this point semingly entirely recovered from her emotional upset and was twittering around cheerfully, dressing Pink Bunny up in bandannas and Kleenex.) I went back out to look at the damage again. The front passenger-side door was pretty crumpled in, as was the front fender, leaving the right front wheel looking weird and naked. The rear passenger door didn't look that bad, but it wouldn't open, either. Even the glove compartment had been knocked out of true.
I was extremely grateful that the accident hadn't been my fault. Since I started driving in November 2003, I'd definitely been in situations where I thought, "jeez, if that had been an accident, it would have been so my fault." But this time, when the actual metal-crunching happened, I hadn't been doing anything wrong. I didn't have to feel guilty. Phew. An added plus was that it was the nice man's insurance company that would pay out money, and my rates--already astronomical from my being a new driver living in a high-rate area--wouldn't go up. I did feel bad about the nice man's insurance rates, especially since I had a "there but for the grace of god..." kind of feeling about the accident. I could have done something stupid like that. I had done stupid things like that. Just, as it happened, none that resulted in contact with another vehicle or other solid object.
So. The nice man's insurance company did pay out money. They sent a guy out a couple days later to look at smushed Constance, and then contacted us to let us know that they considered her totalled. Pete was home when the guy came over, and said that he'd been impressed with what good shape she'd been in. Yeah. She was. I mean, except the headlight and the axles and the brakes and the antenna. But still. My heart hurt thinking about it. They cut us a check for $1900-some-odd.
So. She's still sitting in our driveway, waiting to be towed away to a junkyard. There are a lot of 1990 Camrys still on the road, so her parts probably won't go to waste.
And I'm driving a new car. I'll tell that part of the story tomorrow.
It was midday on a Sunday, on the way back from the grocery store, Cassie in her car seat in the middle of the back seat (when Cass was still a tenant of my uterus, Pete studiously read up on optimal car seat placement--central is safest). Pete is forever taking "shortcuts," which of course, in stereotypically wifely fashion, I reserve the right to privately consider "longcuts." But on this day, I thought, what the hell. Maybe I should try to cut through, here. Taking Main Road 1, as I always do, is somewhat the long way around. By a tiny bit, but still. So I tried it. But I botched it, missing the crucial second turn on the little side street, thinking it was too soon for it. So I ended up sailing past and having to turn onto Main Road 2, the one that runs by the other end of our little street. Well, whatever. I'd wasted 5 minutes at most, no biggie. Cassie was starting to get a little restive, but we were really really almost home. 4 blocks, 3 blocks...
For some reason, from Main Road 2, I always want to turn left onto Little Street J, one block too early, so I have to pay attention and make sure I wait to get to Little Street A. So there we were, there was Little Street J coming up, and I didn't want that one... WHOA! HEY! [swerve, brake] BANG. A light blue American car (not an SUV, thank goodness) was making a left-hand turn onto Main Road 2 from a little side street on my right and for some reason was undeterred by the presence of oncoming traffic. Which is to say, me.
After a split second of denial that this just actually happened, followed by a fleeting thought that maybe if I just drove home as if nothing had happened, the day could just go on normally, I snapped to and realized that I had been knocked into the oncoming lane and should probably at least move my car out of the way of traffic. So I gingerly stepped on the gas and eased us into Little Street J (which of course I'd been trying to avoid) and pulled over. By this time, Cassie was crying hard. We'd been jolted, but it didn't seem like we'd been jolted that hard. I could just feel the slightest ache across my collarbone, where I'd been thrown against the seatbelt, and that was all. So it didn't seem as though Cass, strapped down into her padded car seat, should have been hurt too badly. But still. Maybe she had bitten her tongue? I got out and opened the back door and leaned in to try to figure out what the bawling was about. Cassie finally calmed down enough to be intelligible--"Broken!" she was wailing. "It's broken!" She was worried about the car.
The light blue car, airbags deployed, windshield broken, front end crumpled, pulled in in front of my car, and the driver got out. He was in his late 40s, maybe, early 50s, with an almost Californian post-hippy look--longish hair and tradesman clothes and a little bead necklace. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!" he said. He had a thick local accent. He said he was hurrying home to get the car to his wife, who had to go somewhere. He said he'd driven a school bus for 15 years and never had an accident. He said the car had been his father's, and he'd inherited it when his father died 2 years ago. He talked about how shaken and upset he was, and he thought he was having a heart attack (which he quickly clarified was just a joke when I looked up with flared nostrils and what must have been a slightly alarmed, how-much-CPR-do-I-remember? expression on my face). He apologized some more.
Being a relatively new driver, I had just a vague notion that now we were supposed to "exchange information," but my thoughts were all blowing around in shreds, and refused to coalesce into anything more helpful than that. He got out his license and proof of insurance and laid them on my hood. I didn't know what I was looking for. I copied down his name and address, and he gave me his phone number. License plate number? Insurance company? Policy number? VIN? Not so much. I'm just lucky that he was an honest guy and not an asshole. It turned out that it was actually his father's name on the paperwork I was looking at, so I didn't even have his name right. But we agreed that we'd talk by phone in about an hour, after we'd both calmed down a bit, and then got in our cars and limped home. And sure enough, he called me, and we did a more thorough job of exchanging information on the telephone--it turned out that he'd been at least as flustered and not substantially more experienced in these things than I, never having had an accident himself, so he'd been kind of stumped too.
My first impulse was to minimize what had happened. When I told Pete about it, I characterized it as a "little" accident, "not that bad." He went out to look at the damage and came back in looking kind of serious. It was actually pretty bad, he said. I had to sit on the couch and cry a little bit. I didn't really know what I was crying about, exactly. I mostly just wanted it to go back to being a normal Sunday. (Fortunately, Cassie was by this point semingly entirely recovered from her emotional upset and was twittering around cheerfully, dressing Pink Bunny up in bandannas and Kleenex.) I went back out to look at the damage again. The front passenger-side door was pretty crumpled in, as was the front fender, leaving the right front wheel looking weird and naked. The rear passenger door didn't look that bad, but it wouldn't open, either. Even the glove compartment had been knocked out of true.
I was extremely grateful that the accident hadn't been my fault. Since I started driving in November 2003, I'd definitely been in situations where I thought, "jeez, if that had been an accident, it would have been so my fault." But this time, when the actual metal-crunching happened, I hadn't been doing anything wrong. I didn't have to feel guilty. Phew. An added plus was that it was the nice man's insurance company that would pay out money, and my rates--already astronomical from my being a new driver living in a high-rate area--wouldn't go up. I did feel bad about the nice man's insurance rates, especially since I had a "there but for the grace of god..." kind of feeling about the accident. I could have done something stupid like that. I had done stupid things like that. Just, as it happened, none that resulted in contact with another vehicle or other solid object.
So. The nice man's insurance company did pay out money. They sent a guy out a couple days later to look at smushed Constance, and then contacted us to let us know that they considered her totalled. Pete was home when the guy came over, and said that he'd been impressed with what good shape she'd been in. Yeah. She was. I mean, except the headlight and the axles and the brakes and the antenna. But still. My heart hurt thinking about it. They cut us a check for $1900-some-odd.
So. She's still sitting in our driveway, waiting to be towed away to a junkyard. There are a lot of 1990 Camrys still on the road, so her parts probably won't go to waste.
And I'm driving a new car. I'll tell that part of the story tomorrow.
posted by Rosie Bonner at 11:12 AM
1 Comments:
When I totalled my Dasher, I took pictures. Not for-insurance-purposes pictures, but attempts at portraits to remember her by: a photo just of her, with her sad broken door dangling down toward the asphalt; another of us together for one last time; another as she was towed away by the nice man who did it for free. I should have taken a picture of the wooden knob on the gearshift. It was special. I don't think they're made out of wood anymore.
Post a Comment
<< Home