Those of us who grew up watching Saturday Night Live like to quote Gilda Radner’s crazy-haired character Roseanne Roseannadanna, who said, ‘It’s always something.”
It is. Always. Something.
My husband and I were meeting our younger son and his girlfriend for dinner to celebrate her college graduation and her new job.
We got there, and as we waited for a booth to be cleared, we wondered what was taking them so long.
I got a phone call from the girlfriend, who calmly said they’d been in an accident not far from the restaurant. The first question, obviously, was whether they were OK. They were.
Our son got on the phone and was uncharacteristically calm.
We hurried to the scene, and the front bumper on our son’s car was not a pretty sight. It was worse than the other car, which he had run into.
The driver of the car he ran into was a nice woman, who simply said, “Things happen.”
When the police officer came, he was friendly and put us at ease. He called the place where the wreck happened “a terrible intersection,” and just gave our son a warning.
The wreck put a little damper on our celebration, but we went anyway, thankful nobody was hurt.
Until his could be fixed, our son drove my husband’s car — a zippy little 1998 sedan, which we bought from my mother’s friend years ago for a song.
We got a call from our son on Mother’s Day, when he was coming back from helping his girlfriend move to Little Rock.
The car was acting weird, he said, and he needed his dad to come pick him up.
The next day my husband limped the car to a mechanic, and the verdict was not good: The transmission was shot.
We had the conversation then about whether it’s worth fixing, or is it time to get a new one? By new, I mean used.
My husband said he was thinking about “something from this century.”
The fact that he will be driving back and forth to Mississippi this summer to work on his doctorate was a big factor. Thankfully, the car conked out a few miles from home instead of 300 miles away in the Mississippi Delta.
We decided to scrap the car and got a private individual to buy it.
After a short and intense process, which included prowling car lots at night, we found a great used car for him.
(By the way, we also found one unlocked, sat in it, and locked it when we left.)
He actually felt guilty for buying one so nice, but the fact that it already had XM Radio sold him. He had it in the old car, and he’ll enjoy it on those long drives every weekend from school.
The day we bought the car, he found out that a suspicious mole he had that had been biopsied wasn’t cancer.
Gilda, who made everybody laugh, died of ovarian cancer, which I had forgotten until I started writing this.
It is “always something” in our lives, but the fact is, most of it doesn’t matter.
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.