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Every once in a great while, I like to do something that is interesting and full of surprises – in the way that a science experiment is interesting and surprising. I like to, at least once yearly, clean out my car.
I am usually prompted to do this chore when a friend who has just as many kids as I do, and is therefore just as busy as I am, drives up - and as I am wrestling my youngest son out of her car (he never wants to come home! It’s insulting!) I notice that I don’t smell french fries. This association – french fries/car, is so strong in my head that I am hungry in car dealerships and want to drive every time I’m in a McDonald’s. After sniffing around like a hound dog, my eyes then fall on her newly vacuumed floor. Where’s the gunk? How come she’s so organized? While waving goodbye, I decide to take my own vehicle up to the carwash for a good cleaning.
Now, car washes are fun, there’s just no disputing that. I’d like to spend more time at car washes – I find the sounds soothing, and I love the feeling of renewal as those long strips full of suds slap against the sides of the car. There was the one time that I turned my windshield wipers on reflexively and the strips got all tangled up in them…but we won’t focus on that now. What we will focus on is that by the time your car emerges with a last push from the carwash, you have somehow changed your whole life around. You are going to get your closets organized, return the phone calls you’ve been neglecting, and buy plastic bins for winter-clothes storage, instead of using Hefty bags for yet another year. You’ve changed – it’s Organized You. And you like it.
After the outside of the car is washed, it’s time to focus on the inside – you tell yourself you’ll reward yourself with one of those smell-trees that hang from your knobs and smell like restrooms (clean restrooms, or course, in up-scale hotels.) Normally a pretty friendly person, I choose the vacuum station as far away from the mainstream as possible, because I look like a guilty executive throwing out client files by the armload as I attempt to unburden my car from all the papers and trash. Once that is done (Burger King wrappers clinging to my jeans, dirty post-it notes stuck to my hair) it is time to vacuum, or as Native Americans might put it, The Time of the Great Noise. Now, these vacuum cleaners are industrial – I can fit almost my whole head into the tube – and yet, my chosen vacuum always starts groaning and trying to thrash away from me under the sheer tonnage pressure of all the french fries. Also, coins that I didn’t see during the cleaning process (code for: coins I was too lazy to pick up) rattle incessantly in the vacuum tube in a crazy cleaning percussion as I grunt and groan with the stress of trying to reach under the passenger seat (Note: always know where your cell phone is before vacuuming; there is nothing more depressing than having to call it to locate it, only to hear it ring from somewhere deep inside the vacuum. They’ll have to call the manager for this – the one with all the keys.)
Finally, you hang up your vacuum tube, jingle your extra quarters (I always wildly over-estimate costs for this job, and end up with a kitty of three hundred heavy quarters) and look around your car. Not to shabby, you think. Maybe you’ll even get fancy and put a tissue box in the back, or maybe even a small stuffed animal – one that really represents the inner you. Maybe you’ll even get a color-coordinated afghan to throw over your lap on those long trips to CVS. Nah – just go get a smelly tree. I heard they have a new scent, called “French Fry." I’m going to get one! |
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