Three is a magic number. If you’re old enough that you could never commit to which Bobby you had a bigger crush on – Brady, Sherman, or Goldsboro – then you’re old enough to remember the Schoolhouse Rock tribute to the number three. I’m pretty partial to the number myself, mainly because of the 3-taco combo at the Tex Mex place.
Anyway, what was memorable about the Schoolhouse Rock video was that there was a large magician in a pink coat, after which a man and a woman had a little baby in psychedelic colors, and then some football players with jerseys, all bearing numbers which were multiples of three came out of the locker room, with number 30 always busting the wall. This proved to be an important method to learn multiplication tables. And also to get out of the way when I saw someone wearing a jersey with 30 on it.
Three is pretty magic. Around here anyway. In the same weekend, three cars petered out, and it didn’t take a fat magician in a pink coat for me to know I was knocking on the door of a car payment for 36 months.
I needed to go to Memphis on purpose the following weekend when I began to realize walking was going to be my surest option. And there were three cars and a flat bicycle in the driveway at the time.
Vehicle #1: The Highlander, Sally. She had been my dear friend for seven years, the kind of friend that’s not always the cleanest or the prettiest, but reliable in a pinch. But something was going on now that hadn’t before. Sally had never been a good speller, creating words without vowels and expecting us to understand (i.e. prndl and scn/trbl). But now some red lights were coming on saying VSC, and it seems when they did, I was vscing pretty noticeably. I was vscing like a bounce house full of 9-year-olds. And at one point while backing out of a parking spot in a busy shopping center, I vsced to a complete halt. The people trying to go around me were about as patient as Sergeant Carter in a line behind a coupon queen. If I had been in Memphis, I’d have been dead.
Vehicle #2: The Matrix, Buster. Buster was two birthdays away from getting antique tag status. But he sat in the drive for the sole purpose of being a back-up. He was good for it. Usually. My husband had pondered over Sally’s VSC challenge about twenty minutes with a wrench in hand, when he said, “I think Buster’s going to Memphis with you.” That same day, I had two dear friends staying at our house, ages 8 and 10. I’m not sure what the plan was, but I just needed to get out of the house for a while, so I said, “Let’s go find some chickens.” Not to eat, but you know, chickens are just good, cheap entertainment. So I took my friends to what the world calls Rural King, but we call, the chicken store. On the return trip, Buster started to show his age. We were moving in traffic to the speed of one mile per Bohemian Rhapsody. We sounded like a combined sleep study of everyone who needed a CPAP machine. I had Siri text my husband, “I feel like I’m driving the Tin Lizzies at Six Flags. This car isn’t making it to Memphis, and I’m not sure it’s making it home.”
Vehicle #3: The pick-up, Bruno. We’ve had Bruno since the Patriarchal Age. You still roll his windows down with a hand-crank. He behaves. He gets you where you need to go, and can haul most of the contents of the state of Montana in his rear end. But there is this one thing. He screams like a fox in heat when you take off in a parking lot. This draws some unwanted attention to me at high brow events I didn’t want to come to in the first place. It’s just a little embarrassing when everyone’s neck cranes and jaws drop, and I’m like, “Whoops, was that me?”
That’s the low end of embarrassment. The high end is what Bruno started doing, yep, the week before Memphis. The MANUAL lock latch got stuck kind of between locked and unlocked, so Bruno said, “Eh, let’s just go with locked.” This was the driver’s side, which meant, to get in and out of the cab, the driver needed to climb through the passenger side, over the four-in-the-floor gear shifter and emergency brake pull and whatever all else that your wife has put in the cab, and then turn around in that space to sit forward under the steering wheel. Do not try to take a movie of your husband doing this. It will be thrown out before it can be used as evidence in family court. But I did get a quick still pic, included here. This was at church.
Afterward, we went to a restaurant, and I was halfway through my burger, when he got up, looked at his watch, and said, “Well, I’m going to go ahead and start getting in the truck now.”
I begged him for this not to be my Memphis option. Not for a ladies’ event where I was the speaker, would meet a welcoming committee, and would be wearing a dress. Please no.
So three turned out to be the magic number. Within 33 hours of three ain’t-dead-yet-but-have-the-coroner-on-speed-dial vehicles, we were the proud owners of Dorcas. She’s good, she’s fairly pretty, and under warranty. But three is the magic number.
Three is how many times I drove to the dealership two hours away. The first was to buy the car, the second was to return both sets of keys to Sally (the trade-in) because both of us, respectively, forgot to give Sally’s keys to the new owners, and she was sitting in the middle of a car lot of shiny, new automobiles, and they could not do one thing to move her an inch out of her glory spot. And third, I suddenly remembered that I had left dozens of pairs of earrings and about four important thumb drives in a secret compartment in Sally. It was a compartment so secret that apparently I temporarily didn’t even know about it.
So three. Three dead cars; three trips to Sheffield, Alabama; and three things come open every time I think I’m opening the little door to the gas tank. Now I’ve got to shut the hood, shut the hatch, and turn off the dome lights.
I’ll get this. Just give me three weeks and a big, pink magician.
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