Last night I came home from work at roughly 9:30pm. Driving in a rental, I pulled up and saw Nick sprawled on the couch, watching our old but new to us TV (huge applause to Nick’s cousin, Abby Cordonnier and fiancee for selling us a monstrously large and much improved telly) with an intent look on his face. I was chatting on the phone with Kelly, Nick’s sister, about the joys and woes of the growing Pinto Bean in my belly.
As I babble, I observe Nick is flipping the channel between some NBC news special on the White House and an ABC special program about what the earth will look like in the year 2100. After I got off the phone, Nick scooted closer to me and says, “It’s good your home. I was about to kill myself after watching this,” he referenced the Earth 2100 show.
I sat down to watch.
In the next 20 minutes, I watched the most depressing and strange story which told a part cartoon, part computerized tale that predicted what the world will become should we continue in our fossil fuel consuming ways. The southern states of the USA were desert, the coasts were in perpetual threat of flooding, and everyone was hoodlums with shopping carts on the side of the road, hitch hiking their way to Canada. I felt like I wanted to just bury my head in a sand dune and hope for a quick death. That or drink myself into an oblivion.
“Ugh,” I grunted at Nick, “it IS a good thing I came home when I did. You might have put a bullet to your noggin if you were alone watching the world go to shit.”
We tried to focus on something else to cheer ourselves up from the morbidity of 2100 and impending doom of human life.
Nick asked, “Did you see our new car?”
Yesterday, we had our insurance agent shop and find us a car. When they find one that fits your general description, s/he will arrange a test drive and get the car to us for inspection. If we like it, we buy it on the spot. It’s a nice FREE service from Nationwide. (Nick asked the agent 3 times to make sure it was FREE.)
Our used but new to us (do you see a theme emerging yet?) car is 2006 Honda Accord, blue, with a non-descript gray interior. According to Nick, back in his seminary days, one of the older priests drove an Accord and Nick told himself, “If ever someday I have a lot of money, I’m going to buy an Accord.”
I don’t know anyone whose car fantasies began in the parking lot of a Cincinnati seminary.
As Nick retold me his vow to buy an Accord someday, I jested, “Well, we are just rolling in the millions these days, so let’s pull the trigger. It’s now or never.”
The test drive was scheduled at 2pm yesterday and I was not able to get off work. Nick was hesitant to be the only one driving/inspecting the car, but I told him, “Look, this will be the second biggest purchase you have to make without me. Remember, we bought our house without my ever seeing it. Now it’ll also be our car.”
The Accord runs beautifully.
We returned our rental last night and then drove around Cleveland, frequently getting lost because we are the two most geographically challenged people in the midwest.
“I like it,” I told Nick. “Good job.”
Nick muses, “This thing is going to last forever. I mean, it’s an ACCORD. It’s supposed to run forever. For real, the world is going to collapse on itself in 2100, but this car is still going to be running.”