The other night I was loading my groceries into my car when a friend pulled up beside me. He was driving his brand new car.
Well, it's three months old, so it might as well be new. It is a fine piece of German engineering, very expensive. I had seen him a few days after her got it and he was like a new father. I almost expected him to offer me a cigar.
It has been his pride and joy, but as I looked, I saw there was something different about the car. The hood didn't seem to be closed right. When I looked closer, I noticed the front bumper was all crumpled in. I asked him what had happened.
"My kid," he said, shaking his head dolefully.
I tried not to laugh. This was the same guy who couldn't wait till his kid got her licence so he wouldn't be ferrying her around from pillar to post. Now it seemed she'd found some sort of a pillar or a post all by herself.
I tried to console him. "Aw, think of it this way," I said. "Now your kid has a story that will last her a lifetime. She's got the story of her first fender bender."
Just about everyone has a first fender bender story. For me, it happened three days after I got my licence. I was in my dad's canary yellow 1967 Chrysler Newport convertible, a car he'd bought one day in a bout of middle aged craziness that still makes my mother shake her head in wonder. He'd been sent to buy a station wagon - proper thing, for a man with six kids at home. And he'd come back with this testosteronemobile.
Anyway, three days after I'd got my driver's licence, he let me take the car to the store. In my defence, I should say he didn't specify a route, so after a couple of stops I was cruising with a carload of teenage boys in daddy's convertible. We had the top down, and every street we drove down was covered with a thin film of hormones from the clouds we were emitting.
We passed by a clot of teenage girls, and slowed down to talk, the way they did in the movies. I took my eyes off the road ahead for one second, and the next thing you know we'd fetched up into a car that had braked for, I don't know, a stray kitten or something. My friends jumped out and took off with the girls, leaving me to exchange particulars with the other driver, who turned out to be a minister. My luck.
You might think three days was pretty fast, but it's nowhere near the record. In fact, it was only the third fastest in my family.
The day after my brother got his licence, Dad was teaching him how to pull into the narrow, short garage we had. And it took some learning. The Chrysler Newport was about a block long - it was articulated in the middle so it could take corners. You didn't so much park it as dock it.
Anyway, you had to pull it as far forward as possible in order to shut the door behind it, and Dad was barking directions: "More ... more ... more .. okay .. now STOP!" He yelled the last, and my brother slammed on the brake, except in this car it turned out the brake wasn't that tall, skinny pedal on the right. He stomped on the gas, and 383 cubic inches of American ingenuity almost took that car through the end wall. The wall held, but the shock wave spilled three bicycles down onto the hood from overhead. We left Dad in the car with his head in his hands.
My sister holds the family mark, though. The very day she passed her driving exam, she went back to the car in the Department of Motor Vehicles parking lot, backed out, and broadsided a Volkswagen beetle.
We still chuckle over these stories at family gatherings, and I thought it would cheer my friend up to know that years from now when he thought about his daughter's first fender bender he would laugh and laugh.
It didn't work. He didn't cheer up one little bit.
Some people just aren't able to see the bright side of things.
Nils Ling's book "Truths and Half Truths" is a collection of some of hismostmemorable and hilarious columns. To order your copy, send a cheque or money order for $25.00 (taxes, postage and handling included) to RR #9, 747 Brackley Point Road, Charlottetown, PE, C1E 1Z3 [email protected]
