Paint the town beige

The driveway at my house generally looks like a used-car lot, in part because we haven’t been able to fit a vehicle in our garage since about a week after we moved in. There’s a refrigerator, freezer, dog crate, cedar chest and rusting universal gym in there, but no cars.

So the other day, I took notice of what was parked in front of my house:

- a fairly-new Saturn SUV, driven by my wife;
- a sporty red Ford Mustang with new rims and tires and all sorts of decals that my son added, I assume so he could attract even more police attention;
- a nice Dodge Stratus that is driven by my daughter and is only a few years old and in very good condition, except for the inexplicable make-up smears on the radio dial;
- and an absolute piece-of-crap 2000 beige Chevy Impala, with about 130,000 miles on it and a crack in the windshield that looks like an aerial view of the Snake River. This, of course, is my car.

How did this happen? My son’s car has a sound system that would be the envy of Dr. Dre, and all the Impala has is a radio and a cassette player. They stopped making cassettes about, what, 20 years ago? Do you know how tired I am of listening to sports-talk radio and Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits?

This morning went outside about 6:20 a.m. to discover the Beige Love Machine was covered in permafrost. So I got an empty cassette case, scraped off as much ice as I could, cranked the beast and headed off to work.

I’d gone about 10 miles when it dawned on me that, somehow, the air coming out of the vents was actually colder than the outside temperature. Instead of defrosting my windshield, it was glazing it. Try sticking your head out the window on I-75 so you can see where you’re going on a 30-degree morning. It’s a miracle a truck didn’t swerve into my lane and Ichabod Crane-me. My head was colder than Ted Williams’ when I finally got to work.

Before I got the Impala, I was sporting around town in a 1997 Plymouth mini-van, a chick magnet if there ever was one. But that was like a Lamborghini compared to the AARP-mobile I’m driving around in now.

Why does Dad, the guy who pays for the car insurance and makes sure the oil gets changed and the tires get rotated for everybody, have to drive the worst car? I should be tooling around in style, in some sort of turbo-charged sporty convertible while the rest of them drive Yugos that have to be parked facing downhill in order for them to start. It’s just not fair.

Nobody in the family but me and Lucky will even ride in my car, and even she won’t put her head out the window because she’s embarrassed for other dogs to see her.

Oh, well. Someday, when the house is paid for and I get the kids off the payroll, I’m going to get a nice car for myself, even if I’m too old to drive it. I’ll get something fancy that even has a CD player, and me and Bob Seger will just sit in the driveway and have the times of our lives.