As a former public school teacher, I have always driven a sensible car. I was owner of a long line of Ford Tempos, Ford Escorts, and Ford Fiestas. Cars on a teacher’s budget. I was lucky to be at least one step above Hondas and AMC Gremlins, though Ford, as we all know, is the acronym for “Fix Or Repair Daily”. Well, this week I have encountered a Really Cool Car for the first time in my life. Oh, I have ridden in them before… had show-off-y friends who owned them and rich relatives. (Did you know I’m related to Nelson Rockefeller? It’s through the Aldrich part of his family, his mother’s side. But distant enough to be totally out of the inheritance lottery.) But never before have I driven one.

The latest daily repair which involved hitting a pothole in my new Fiesta and destroying a front wheel, required a rental car. But thanks to recent hail in the DFW area, Enterprise Rent-a-Car had no cheap ones available that the insurance would completely pay for. Instead, I had to settle for a 2015 Dodge Challenger, a $95 a day expense that would’ve bankrupted me two months ago. As it is, the cost is taking a big bite out of my newly restored credit standing. But… hey! A sports car!
Of course, the threat of more hail has been looming, and though my car insurance would cover the damage (minus the $500 deductible) I would have to continue to pay rent on it each day it spent in the shop… and that could take months. It gives me pause because I do not have any place to shelter it beyond one live oak tree that spreads her mighty greens out over the street where my previous Fiesta was killed in a drive-by. But… hey again! A sports car!
It drives like a dream. I never imagined a car could handle so easily and have so much potential power under the hood. The rental people told me there was no mileage limit at this price level. A weekend in Vegas? Tempting, but I am a former school teacher. The level of trouble I could get into as the country mouse in the big city is too scary to contemplate. I would be some cat’s dinner for sure. I have dared to drive the thing to pick up kids at school, and driving to Walmart where there are evil decorative rocks lurking everywhere. But that is the limit of the daring side of me. I might take my family to a movie at Cinemark later. But that’s about as wild-side as I ever walk.
Will I ever drive a sports car like this again? A sleek black Batmobile-looking thing that makes me feel powerful and potentially wild? Of course not! It’s Mickey we are talking about here.




































But the thing about monster movies… at least the good ones, is that you can watch it to the end and see the monster defeated. We realize in the end that the monster never really wins. He can defeat the monstrous qualities within himself and stop himself. Or the antidote to what ails him is discovered (as Luke did with Darth Vader). Or we can see him put to his justifiable end and remember that if we should see those qualities within ourselves, we should do something about it so that we do not suffer the same fate. Or, better yet, we can learn to laugh at the monstrosity that is every-day life. Humor is a panacea for most of life’s ills.

“The fool’s mother constantly puts a sign on his bedroom door that says, Clean your room! So he has to do it every day before he can do anything else. One day he decided he didn’t want to clean his room that day, and he made a sign himself. It said, Don’t put any signs on this door! He put it on his bedroom door. But then he read what it said and had to take it down again.”
