An ode to a minivan
On a hellacious car-buying experience and the glorious "every-day adventures" that followed
I don’t want to brag, but I bought a minivan.
I have rarely felt more like a grownup than when I drove it off the lot … and I have rarely been madder than I was at that moment. I can laugh at it now … mostly.
I hate buying cars because I’m utterly clueless about everything about them, from the tires to the roof to everything in between.
As for how much I should pay for the tires and the roof and everything in between, how the hell am I supposed to know? It’s as if the whole car-buying system is set up to make the buyer feel ignorant.
Call me crazy, but if I’m going to buy something as expensive as a minivan, I’d like to have a vague notion of what I’m doing. Nope. On top of feeling ignorant from the get go, I can’t believe that the process of buying the second most expensive thing I have ever bought went down like this …
After I called to make an appointment, the dealership, or someone hired by the dealership, sent me a text with the time of the meeting, the name of a saleswoman and a description of the building where we would meet.
All three were wrong.
The time said 9:30 pm instead of 9:30 am. I wrote back to verify the correct time, and got no response. I called and asked for the saleswoman by name, and nobody at the dealership had ever heard of her. When my wife and I got to the location, the building that the text described – big and red – was quite simply not there. We went in anyway.
Again I asked for the saleswoman by name. Again nobody had heard of her. I'm sure she works in a big red building somewhere, and I’m dying to know where.
I stayed because I saw a great price listed online, a price so low we decided to buy this vehicle new instead of a used one we were considering. I called, twice, to see if that was the right price. They said yes, twice.
Prepare to be shocked: That was not the right price, unless you met a list of requirements that boggled my mind (first generation college grad and military veteran with a degree in underwater basket weaving and a last name with two consecutive Qs, or something like that, it was so complicated I couldn’t follow it). My wife and I were going to walk out, but they dropped the price close to the advertised price, and we knew that was a great deal, so we stayed.
After all that, I drove my brand-new minivan home and discovered they gave us the wrong one. Literally. The wrong van: They had four exactly the same; the VIN on my van did not match the VIN on my documents. And it had ants crawling around in a clump of mud in it besides.
We finally got the right car and the tires were so under-inflated that the warning light came on.
After all that, we love the damn thing. I am “that dad,” the one who wants to pile every kid in the neighborhood into the car and go to the pool or the park or the trailhead and OK OK OK we can stop for ice cream. Before the van, I could only take my two kids plus two. Now I can cram half the neighborhood in there.
I organized a camping trip with 14 dads and 30-something kids, and I suppose the trip would have happened with or without the minivan, but it’s so much easier to go on an adventure when you don’t have to decide what to bring, you just bring it all because “it all” fits in the back of a minivan.
The other day I took my girls and four of their friends to a pool. Their joyful laughter is still ringing in my ears. Gosh I love that sound. C.S. Lewis once wrote that his favorite noise was grown men laughing. Ol’ Narnia boy musta never heard girls giggling.
It was an all-time great "regular-day adventure," made possible only because we bought the van. I’m looking forward to many more of those.
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I love this quote from Steven MacDonald, and based on what I heard after publishing it in the last newsletter so do a lot of you: “The suffering is what makes life beautiful. A lot of people don’t have any desire to appreciate life like that. They’d rather sit in a chair and watch TV. People who really aspire to suck as much life out of life as they can are people that in the end are ultimately happy. Adversity creates the best memories.”
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