This was uttered by my son after I snatched the car keys off the kitchen table to drive him to school. He was obviously concerned someone would see me. When I looked down at myself, I saw sleep shorts that had fit much better six months ago and a dumpy tank top that wasn’t supporting anything. I didn’t need a mirror to tell me that my hair was doing something unnatural and disturbing.
“It’s not like I’m getting out of the car! I’ll just drop you off and drive away; no harm, no foul.”
My feeling was that, worst case scenario, one of the safety patrol kids would help my boy with the passenger door and catch a glimpse of such horror they’d have to go wash their eyes out with industrial strength hand soap.
When we got in the car and headed up the street, I saw the glowing, orange idiot light in the shape of a gas station pump: a helpful invention telling oblivious people to fill up soon if they don’t want to get stranded on the side of the highway while they wait for their aggravated husband to come rescue them. The light had come on the previous day and I tried to calculate how much further I could drive before I pushed fate too far.
My mind flashed back to 1990 when my brother, Adam, and I drove to Atlanta for a concert. Adam’s car didn’t have that particular warning light and, in my frantic dash to make up for lost time, I had neglected to catch sight of the indicator needle slipping beneath “E.”
Running out of gas was bad enough, but doing it in front of your younger brother in his car was maddeningly embarrassing.
After leaving my son at school, I decided to drive to the closest gas station and take care of my vehicle’s dehydration status. A truck was getting gassed up so I pulled into a slot where the pump would hide most of my disheveled self. I thanked my good fortune when I slipped on a jacket I’d found in the car then quickly filled ten bucks in the tank before speeding off to the privacy of my home.
You’d think I would have learned a valuable lesson from all this, but (like my friend, Amy) I’m pretty stubborn when it comes to learning lessons.
Last week, my sister agreed to watch my kids while my husband and I went to his 20 year high school reunion “meet-and-greet” at Cowpoke’s Watering Hole. Since I like to take showers in peace (without hearing my kids scream at each other in the background), I figured I’d drive them to Meredith’s house first. Her one stipulation was to pick up pizza.
I threw on some old gym clothes and decided my son was plenty old enough to walk into Little Caesar’s by himself and pay for a couple of their “Hot-N-Ready” pizzas.
Friday at 5:30 in the evening is apparently a popular time to get pizza because he waited for almost 30 minutes before he took possession of them. He walked to the door, and, due to his inexperience in dealing with awkward, flat boxes, tried to open the door with one hand while holding the precious pizzas in the other. The pepperoni didn’t make the transition and ended up face-down on the dirty sidewalk. Lucky for us, the good people of Little Caesar’s handed him a fresh pizza with no questions asked.
Maybe, from now on, I might not leave the house if I’m not presentable to the public, but I wouldn’t put my money on it.
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