A Horse And Buggy Hit Our Car

Cars are like pets. They are part of the family.

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My grandmother had a Volkswagen Beetle like the one shown above. Hers was gray. When I was six years old in Seattle, she would pick up my brother and me and drive us to her apartment, a twenty-minute ride from our house. My brother was four, so he got to sit in the back-back seat and bounce around on the steep hills in Seattle while my 4'10" grandmother jerked that stick shift confidently through the neighborhoods up and down steep hills.

I smile because no one thought about car seats and safety in 1962.

My grandmother kept that car until someone stole it in 1970. Insurance replaced it with a newer model of the same kind. The new Beetle was white. In 1980, when Mount Saint Helens blew her stack in Oregon, it rained gray ash all over my grandmother’s car in Seattle. By that time, my grandmother was 79 years old. When she was 86, she stopped driving, and gave the car to my brother, who now needed it to drive to work. He didn’t fit in the backseat of the car anymore, but he enjoyed driving the car for several years.

The car had zero extras. No AC. No radio. Only a plastic place where the radio would have fit. He called it a serene car.

He thought if he added a radio, someone might wanna steal the car or break into…