I am a Material Girl...or not

Pin It

Don't move! I want to forget you just the way you are.

Henny Youngman

I seem to have an automobile disability.

I have a hard time telling which kind of car is which and whose car is whose – even my own sometimes.

Now if you have a distinctive kind of automobile then I can usually keep up. Z for example has a fairly distinctive red kind of car thing. I know when I see a Z-type car. I don’t always know for sure if it’s him I see bopping around town, but I know from that red type of car thing that it could be him. But if it’s a vehicle that is fairly run-of-the-mill or somewhat nondescript, I’m just not “in” to cars enough to know or remember.

For a long time I drove a bright red Pontiac Grand Prix and that worked for me pretty well in trying to find it out in parking lots and stuff. I didn’t really go to the car dealership looking for the bright red car – it was more about getting a good deal, but as it turned out it was useful to be able to look for that color. Now however, I drive a metallic grey 4- door midsized sedan. It’s been a good car and I like it well enough, but it seems to me that every other car I see is about the same size and shape and that every automobile manufacturer must have gotten a great deal on the metallic grey paint because there’s millions of ‘em out there. I hate to admit it because it makes me sound kind of dotty and addled, but I am constantly walking up to the wrong car in parking lots - because they all look the same to me.

Now I’m not so dotty or addled that I can’t tell if it’s my car once I look inside of it – I do recognize my own car trash and floor mat stains etc. It’s just the initial approach that I have trouble with sometimes. Luckily I have one of those remote control lock things so when I’m really looking for my car I can push the button and the lights flash etc. And if I’m really lost I can get the horn to honk.

But sometimes I think I know where I’m going. I’ll walk out to the parking lot with my mind wandering, not particularly concentrating on auto-recovery, carrying a bag or pushing a cart or something and walk towards the general area of where I parked my car and somehow make for the first midsized metallic grey 4-door sedan that I come upon without really concentrating on whether or not it’s the right one or not. I have to admit that due to my condition, there has been more than one time that I find myself standing outside of a metallic grey 4-door sedan pushing the button on my remote control wondering why the doors aren’t unlocking only to realize that it’s not my car.

Ebay just doesn’t understand this disability. But in all fairness to me, Ebay is an automobile mutant. His X-men power is to be able to tell the make and model of every single car that he sees on the road. He knows what every kind of car is, foreign and domestic from Mercedes to Hyundai even going back to late model cars. I’m thinking that there’s got to be some kind of FBI or Secret Service kind of agency that would really appreciate this kind of ability – although clearly it isn’t hereditary. So whenever I’m with Ebay in a parking lot and I tend to start drifting towards the non-specific metallic grey 4 doors, I have to suffer through a fair amount of eye-rolling and snarky teen-age mutant auto-geek kinds of comments.

I’d like to think that I’ve developed this disability because I’m just so wonderfully non-materialistic that worldly possessions such as cars just aren’t important enough to register with me. I’d like to think that….but I think it’s more likely, and I’m sure Ebay will agree, that I’m just getting to be a little bit dotty…and yes, even addled.