Always rent the (red) convertible

“Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.” Cecil Beaton (1859-1941) French philosopher

Red Convertible #1

When gun-wielding snipers were busy terrorizing Washington, D.C. in October 2002, my family still lived there, feeling hunted like small domesticated deer at a salt lick, watching as people who were just living their mundane, prosaic, pedestrian, comfortably boring, and insanely precious everyday lives fell irretrievably dead and cheated of that beautifully humdrum existence, shot through the head while pumping gas, piling lumber in their car at Home Depot, cutting the grass, walking through a grocery store parking lot with their 2% milk, sitting on a bench outside the post office with their new 37¢ Buckminster Fuller stamps, standing in the doorway of a bus on the way to work, crossing the street at a busy intersection to get home to their grandchildren. The salt licks of the modern world. Ten people dead, just like that. Left home one morning to get some postage, gasoline, a jar of sweet dill pickles, a People magazine…and never came home again. So random, so mundane, so vulnerable, so terrorized.

As the siege continued, schools cancelled recess since it was too dangerous for kids to be outside. People stopped walking places; we were prisoners in four walls, dashing frantically from one set of four walls to another, any four walls would do. Gas pumps were a sweet spot for the snipers since people pumping gas don’t typically create a moving target. Before long, gas stations started hanging dark blue opaque plastic tarps to protect their customers from long-range rifle fire and people started filling up their cars with gas in $2 increments, dancing or hopping while pumping, remembering from “Law and Order” (or was it Hoss on “Bonanza” who first told us?) that a zigzagging target is a hard target to hit (unless, of course, you are President Kennedy). If it hadn’t been so frightening and the danger so real, that dancing-at-the-pumps part really could have been funny, like a slightly off kilter Saturday Night Live sketch.

In the midst of the killing spree, we needed to rent a car because ours had just the tiniest, sweetest oil pump problem.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget the rhapsodic look on my husband’s face when he got back from Hertz in a bright red convertible. “Won’t Emma love it? he said excitedly. “I got a really good deal!”

Let’s see.

Snipers.

Red convertible.

Good deal.

Anything wrong with that equation? Why not just paint a target on our heads and get it over with more quickly? I quietly pondered, wondering if he had hit his little head on a sharp object at the Hertz counter, thereby damaging his frontal lobe irreparably while I wasn’t looking. But John had evidently worked out a delicate algorithm of variables that only he understood and that somehow provided irrefutable evidence that his family would not be a target.

John was right. Emma did love it. We didn’t get assassinated. And we have such a fantastic photo of Emma with her dog, Blue, laughing one of those big-mouthed laughs like only a kid can, wind blowing her hair and his ears back as they rode like so much royalty in the back of the convertible, John whistling the last notes of the last work of Mozart in the driver’s seat (or was it “Cheeseburger in Paradise”? I get those two confused), and me in my trench coat and big brimmed hat surreptitiously scoping out gun barrels at every corner, looking for all the world like I was taking one last happy drive with my family before they dropped me off at St Elizabeth’s Mental Institution for a long "rest."

So what if renting a convertible was slightly crazy? After weeks of terror, bad dreams, and militaristic school lock-downs a mere year after all hell broke loose in her 4^th grade world on 9/11, Emma felt free that day for a few hours. It was magical, that tiny bit of idiocy. John taught me a lot that day. And Emma still talks about that convertible.

Red Convertible #2

A few years ago, several women friends and I went for a long weekend of relaxation at Ten Thousand Waves, a Japanese health spa just outside of Santa Fe. As we prepared to fly there for some serious fun that I dare not articulate in this forum and for hot stone massages by large lavender-smelling men named Thor, a huge forest fire was raging in New Mexico or in one of those square states nearby; the news reports were full of dire predictions. We wondered if we should even go, given the danger of being burned alive in our hot tub (let’s face it: there are worse ways to go). Luckily the winds changed and we announced we would be safe (amazing how often we make these pronouncements that serve our purpose, with absolutely no real knowledge to back them up. You’d have thought we all had PhDs in Wind and Raging Firestorm Patterns of the Climatological Southwest).

Our shiny red convertible was ready for us when we touched down in sunny Albuquerque. “How very odd!” we chirped as we drove out of the airport, “such gorgeous weather and no one else rented a convertible!”

As we drove, our oversized Liz Taylor sunglasses and scarves flowing behind us like Amelia Earhart or that poor Isadora Duncan who died when her scarf got caught in the wheels, people kept pointing and smiling, some laughing. “How wonderful!” we gushed, “we must look ravishing and mysterious like so many movie stars! Perhaps they’ve confused us with Julia Roberts and friends—doesn’t she live somewhere around here?”

Little did we know that the whole time we were tooling around the highways and byways of New Mexico chatting about our imaginary movie careers and favorite leading men (yes, for me the Glorious Trifecta of Depp, Hackman, Duvall and the recently added Kevin Bacon, the addition of whom admittedly screws up the use of the word “trifecta”), there was a “Red-Alert-Don’t-Dare-Breathe-the Air-Outdoors-Because of-the-Particulates” warning due to the lingering fires: people statewide were urged to stay indoors AT ALL COSTS. People weren’t smiling because we were ravishing in our convertible; they were smiling because we were idiots in our convertible.

Lung damage aside, driving in a Taurus wouldn’t have made for the amazing memories we have of that time together, nor the fabulous photos of us basking in the sun with ash-covered mountains in the background and not a soul to be seen for miles.

Last December, I took my 12-year-old daughter on a surprise cross-country adventure to sleep with manatees at San Diego’s Sea World, an overnight camp for kids and parents or guardians to learn the A-Zs of manatees and then sleep right straight up against the glass of the manatee aquarium on the cold, hard floor. Those sweet and lumbering giants rolled and played all night long in their warm waterbed as we “slept” (and I use the word loosely) in tiny frigid nylon sleeping bags on the cold, hard floor. Did I mention that the floor was cold and hard? I remember rousing from half-sleep at some point, thrilled that it must be time to get up. Struggling to find my watch by the dim lights of the manatees’ waterworld, I could see that it was 1:30 a.m. Imagine my disappointment, my horror, my longest night, my achy pilgrimage toward dawn.

When we had first landed in San Diego, we headed for the rental car desk. On the way, Emma exclaimed brightly that she couldn’t wait to see our red convertible! My heart sank. To save money, I had rented something incredibly pedestrian, something cheap and plastic smelling with hard seats that would be too straight up and down, manual windows that are hard to crank, and a nonexistent CD player for our Bob Marley tunes. What a terrible and unrelenting disappointment. But I couldn’t bear to tell her just yet.

When we got to the Hertz counter, the rental clerk first chatted with Emma about why we were there and was charmed by her quiet explanation of the trip, including the part about it being a Thelma and Louise road trip but without the drugs, sex, crime, and death. The clerk said we looked like wild women (Emma smiled shyly) and asked if we would like a convertible for the same price. The color? You guessed it—bright cherry red. We were ravishing in our ride; we affectionately named it Rupert.

Here’s what all this leads me to believe: being practical and safe and always logical is way overrated. Sure, I should have saved the manatee trip money to pay for the braces, tuba lessons, and college tuition that are in our future, but at what cost? What would Emma and I have missed? The stories that make up our lives.

We all deserve to have fun, live large, and be ridiculed by less imaginative people existing under the mundane and erroneous assumption that they’ll get extra credit for being prudent. If I recall correctly, the death rate for people who play it safe and people who live boldly is the same: 100%. If I were living the 37 days that prompted the launch of these weekly essays, guess which car I would rent for that last month on earth? Okay, I have to admit that it might not be the red convertible. It might be this VW bug but in bright apple green, simply because the idea of it makes me very, very happy:

~*~ 37 Days: Do it Now Challenge ~*~

Pick one: good gas mileage in an unremarkable car with scratchy seats or amazing memories and the wind in your hair. It’s simple: Life is short. We have choices every day. Each decision should enhance the journey, should be art-full, should be beautiful in some way, the way that it can be. Always rent the (red) convertible (where “convertible” is a handy metaphor for what makes you smile, brings you joy, helps you do daily what my friend Tony tells Emma when he visits from South Africa: “make a memory today”). Don’t just drive somewhere. Make the journey memorable.

Rent the red convertible (or bright green Bug). No exceptions.

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“There’s nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes . . . and dead armadillos.” – Jim Hightower

“Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation.”  – William Lloyd Garrison