Your car is gone
Have I ever told you that Ben and I are opposites?
Of course I have; I say it all the time. We could not be more different. One of our daughters and her family are in the process of demolishing their home while they live in it, including pouring new concrete floors and gutting bathrooms, while simultaneously buying 30-some acres and starting to clear the land with a bulldozer. The five children are having a blast with all the big machines around. I would be breathing into a paper bag.
In our group text this morning, Ben commented, "Life without adventure is mere existence!"
Who is this man?
One of the things you learn quickly about Ben is that he moves at the speed of light. There are only so many years on earth and he's going to do as much as he can possibly cram into them. Sleep is a bother. He'll rest when he's dead. Right now he has things to accomplish.
This life philosophy results in a desire to streamline as much as possible. Every night before bed he does a "pre-flight," meaning he puts the clothes he will wear in the morning in the bathroom so he's not stumbling around in the pre-dawn dark trying to find things. I've made it a habit to set up the coffee pot for him, so all he has to do is pour the water and hit the button. Here lately I've also started putting all his supplements in a little paper cup like the ones they give you in the hospital with your pills in them. I think this probably saves him 30-40 seconds every day.
Coats and hats are staged by the door, which, in our current house, is the dining room table. This is an ongoing wordless "discussion" with us. He comes in and puts his jacket and hat on the chair and goes to his office. I move the jacket and hat to the row of hooks by the hall closet where they belong. When I started looking for plans for our new house, my number-one priority was that we would enter the house through the mudroom. There would be room for all the shoes and boots, plus a wall of hooks for coats and hats and a large shelf for the "stuff" that comes out of all his pockets. If we're going to all the trouble of building a house, I want to make sure the piles are not on the kitchen counter ever again.
The final item that's always been streamlined is the keys. They are left in the cars so that's one less thing he has to remember to grab on his way out the door. This has led to a few "incidents."
Way back in our early days, we bought a Thunderbird (the kind where the front was three times as long as the back) and Ben was going to rebuild the motor in it. It was going to be like new. I quote, "Two weeks, 700 bucks." The motor was rebuilt but it never really ran right so I never got to drive it. Eventually we parked it behind a friend's warehouse and it was stolen, never to be seen again. The Lord is merciful.
Then in the early 2000s when we lived in Spotsylvania, Virginia, Ben had a Taurus we had bought from our neighbor. He loved that car because it was big and roomy and comfortable. One morning I got up and made my coffee and was standing at the front bay window when I had the uneasy feeling that something wasn't right.
I said, "Honey, where's your car?"
Ben asked, "What?"
I repeated the question and said, "It's not in the driveway."
He came running to see, and sure enough, there was no Taurus among the other six cars out there. (We had lots of teenagers, so lots of vehicles.)
He ran to the boys' room; both boys were sleeping. Then to the girls' room; all girls accounted for.
The realization hit and he said in disbelief, "Somebody stole my car!"
I resisted the urge to say, "Hmm. I wonder how that happened!"
The first question the police officer asked when he came to the house was, "Were the keys in it?" I turned and walked into the kitchen, praying Psalm 141:3, "Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips."
The Taurus was found a few days later and returned to us with no damage other than an empty gas tank. We got to keep the rosary beads on the rearview mirror.
Then we moved to Asheville where we lived way up on top of a hill in a place no car thief would ever think to look, and the keys-in-the-car practice was re-established. Old habits die hard.
Now here we are in small-town Virginia, living in the parsonage right next to the church. Surely it's safe to . . .
I park my car in the driveway, and Ben parks his cars (the Honda he drives all the time as well as the Chrysler 300 he refuses to give up on because it's sooooo comfortable) in church parking spaces right next to our driveway. The Chrysler is an ongoing project that has this annoying habit of shutting off at 70 mph when it goes into passing gear. Ben and our son have spent several years trying to figure out the problem with no success. We just keep passing it back and forth between us. So there it sits.
One morning I went to take Hank out at 7 am and stopped in my tracks. I came back and stuck my head in the door and said, "Your car is gone."
By now we're getting good at this. But again, the Lord is merciful and is probably keeping us from pouring any more money into it. I hope the person who stole it had fun when it shut off on the highway. With any luck it will never be found.
I was talking to a friend about it and commenting that I just don't understand the concept of leaving keys in a car. I mean, you're just asking someone to steal it. She said, "Oh, I leave my keys in my car all the time!"
"All the time?"
"Yes!"
"Out in town?"
"All the time!"
What on earth? Is this really a thing? I can't make this work in my mind.
Do people leave their keys in their cars? Do you?