Yesterday, as I sat in stopped traffic on 101 South, my shiny new car, the Out on a Whim, was rear-ended by an inattentive driver. No one was hurt, but now it needs body work.
There is a tradition among boys, or used to be, that when someone shows up at school with bright new sneakers, his friends would purposely scuff them up with the filthy soles of theirs. It’s a way to take the owner’s unseemly pride down a notch, and to eliminate any hesitation he might feel while at play in the schoolyard from wanting to keep the new shoes clean.
I consider this to be the same sort of thing, though it’s weird that it has happened in the first few months of ownership of the only two new cars I’ve ever bought. (My other new car, the Compelling Notion, was leased.) If things go now the way they did in 1998, I’ll get my car fixed with insurance money, drive it without further trouble for most of the next decade, and command a surprisingly high resale price. Not too bad.