~The car. Oh, the car. So here's the story. I was driving Kaylie to Mountain View on November 17th (a Thursday) so she could see Children of Eden for her voice class. Just like every other road I've driven on in the past few months, University Avenue is undergoing construction. I don't quite understand it, since I remember it was torn up 2 years ago. Anyway, the median is gone, lane shifts happen about once a minute, and it's just a nightmare, especially when it's dark. As I was maneuvering through all this junk, I saw some cars up ahead of me going slowly. As I got closer I realized they were stopped completely. So I did what any normal person would do and stopped too, hoping to change into the other lane. But before I got the chance,
Crunch! Jolt! I felt someone smash into us from behind.
I looked at Kaylie. "Did that just happen? What just happened?" Did I just get hit? I may have looked back but couldn't see the car that hit me (except for maybe its headlights, which I don't remember). "What do I do, Kaylie? What do I do?" By this point I was no longer in thinking mode. I was in following orders mode. "Um, turn your blinker on, and go to the shoulder, and then we'll talk to the other car there," she told me. So I put my blinker on, and when Kaylie told me that it was safe, I went over to the shoulder. And I waited for the car that had hit me to show up right behind me. But it was gone. Kaylie got out and looked at the damage and said, "It looks kind of bad." Then I got out and saw the complete left back side of the car completely crumpled and I just about lost it. I called Kevin and asked him to tell me what to do, and could we get neighbors to take Kaylie the rest of the way to Mountain View. And I think I started crying.
By this point, a construction worker or somebody had shown up for the other rear end incident (the one I had had to stop for) and so when it was safe I went back to that lane and went up to him and pointed at my car and said that when the police came with a report to not forget about me and my car which looked way worse than any of the other cars. Man, I probably seemed like a wild woman. It didn't help that I hadn't eaten much dinner. (There had been an IEEE meeting which I went to because it had free pizza, but since a bunch of other people went for the same reason, there wasn't enough to fill my pregnant stomach, making me even crankier. After that dinner, I wondered if my evening could get any worse. Yes, it could.) So I went back to the car and sobbed some and then Kevin showed up with a kind neighbor who took Kaylie the rest of the way to see the musical.
The policeman showed up and after talking to the other accident people for what seemed like forever, he came over and gave me a report and asked if I knew who had hit me. "I just assumed they would follow me right over to the shoulder," I said lamely. "That's what they're supposed to do," he said flatly. Then he mentioned that he had seen a white car way up ahead that was stopped. There was white paint all over the back of my car, so maybe it was the same one. But the car was gone, and he hadn't mentioned any damage (I'm still curious how they were able to drive their car after hitting us so hard, since it seems like its front would have been hammered), so there went that lead. I filled out the police report and then Kevin drove us back home.
Here is a picture we took the next morning:
 |
| Not shown in picture: damaged internal bumper, damaged exhaust system, damaged alignment, etc. |
That afternoon Kevin drove it to the repair shop and found out it was in such bad shape that he wasn't supposed to drive it home. Luckily he got a hold of his sister who picked him up. And that's the last we saw of the car until yesterday morning.
Well, I'd like to say this story had a happy ending and the person who hit us confessed and paid our deductible (which cost more than we were expecting thanks to a "depreciated muffler") and that we got the car back two days later because the replacement parts arrived so quickly and undamaged. I'd also like to say that they replaced the panel where some wonderful children decided to play tic-tac-toe with a rock two years ago (the car's been in the shop twice since then, and it's never been hit in the right spot to replace that. Alas).
But as it is, the ending isn't so bad. After 20 days in the shop, we finally got our car back! And it works! Complete with a brand new shiny exhaust pipe. (I think the people in Casa Dea right next to our parking lot probably think I'm crazy since I've been gushing about the shiny new exhaust pipe so much and so loudly.)
In those carless 20 days, we've had so much support from neighbors and family. There were neighbors who checked on us the minute they heard the news, neighbors who offered their cars while they were gone for Thanksgiving, family who also offered their cars, people who've offered rides, just a lot of stuff. And at least for the first few of those 20 days, it wasn't that cold, so I was able to walk to my doctor's office, El Gallo Giro, 5-buck pizza (hey, we were hungry and lazy those days, plus we had to eat at El Gallo Giro because we had run out of groceries and couldn't get to the store), and everywhere else I cared about. And since it got cold, we've still been able to get rides/borrow cars when necessary. (And Kevin did turn 25 in the midst of all this, so if we'd really needed to we could have rented a car.) Point is, even though this is definitely not how I expected the last 3 weeks to go, it's been a good reminder that we do have lots of wonderful friends and family.
And . . . I think this blog post is long enough as is, so I'll just save my other tidbits of life for another blog post.
No comments:
Post a Comment