Andy Sauer
About 10 years ago, after a cold, wet lacrosse game, my family and I sought refuge from the elements in our minivan as our daughter’s coach debriefed her players in the pouring rain.
My then-12-year-old daughter leapt into the vehicle and, as the automatic door slowly closed, begged us to depart with all deliberate speed.
“Oh my God, I got into the wrong car!”
Evidently, another family, packed into an identical gold Honda Odyssey, was also waiting for their lacrosse player. My daughter got in that vehicle, sat down and saw four faces she didn’t recognize looking right at her. Mortified, she ejected herself from that car and sprinted to ours.
In fairness, there were more than a hundred cars parked in that South Windsor parking lot, all filled with drenched, waiting families, most of them in fogged-up minivans. It could’ve happened to anybody.
I’m not the biggest fan of minivans. They guzzle gas. They’re terrible in snow. The sightlines are brutal. And they’re not exactly “muscle cars.”
I never would have gotten one unless I absolutely had to.
And I did.
With three kids- sometimes more depending on the arrangements – the myriad of activities held inexplicably at the same times, two dogs, the requisite safe-distancing seating rules for long trips, and the ever-increasing amounts of warehouse-sized groceries to feed a growing family, there was no way I was getting through life without a minivan.
To be honest, it kind of grew on me. I used to love pulling into soccer practice, opening the automatic doors, and releasing the kids like a chopper flying into a hot zone: “Go, go, go, go, go!”
We like to believe that the vehicle we drive speaks to our personalities, but I’ve found that it’s more a reflection of our responsibilities.
A family’s timeline can be charted by the cars it drives. It starts out with the dependable used car (usually inherited), moves to that first, affordable brand-new car, migrates to the pragmatic minivan, downshifts to a dependable car (that the kids wind up driving), and shifts to a vehicle that, at last, makes us run.
My family’s not there yet. We own an electric car that economically carts us back and forth to work, though I have been pining for a pickup truck.
Recently, my wife and I were headed to dinner and a play with our friends, fellow Suffieldians Tracy and Keith McDonagh, who graciously offered to drive. They, like us, traded in their minivan long ago for something a little more to their liking. After dinner, my wife and I hung back at the restaurant for a few minutes and said we’d meet our friends in their car.
Walking through the parking lot, my wife made a beeline for this one car.
“Honey, I don’t think that’s where we parked.”
“Black Mercedes, right?”
She got in the car, whereupon I heard a scream of terror from a woman who thought she was being carjacked.
“Oh my God, I got into the wrong car!”
We’ve got to stop running into people like this.