and so what if I had had a baby with me?

Yesterday I went swimming at the university pool again. (Yes, yes, praise and laud me; if you don't know why, read the September 19th entry in the archives.) It was to be a mere hour of my day in between finishing projects for the radio station and getting time at home to write (dammit). Instead, it turned into a five-hour adventure that barely got me home in time to gobble before rushing off to teach my ESLers last evening. For most of that time I was in the parking lot waiting for AAA.

But let's back up a bit. 7:30am and there's a knock at the door. My neighbor from across the street is sheepishly scuffing the ground with white tennis shoes. "I hit your car," she whispers. "Really?!" I say with excited anticipation. "How bad is it??" "Well, I bumped it and I think I left some paint." "Oh," I reply, deflated. I want to tell her to go back and try again. To really put the pedal to the metal this time! But instead I ask her how she likes her Subaru wagon. We want to get rid of both our cars and get a better baby mobile – (no, NOT a minivan and NOT an SUV) maybe one with a hatchback that I could get into one-armed if Little One's in the other. And one that isn't falling to pieces bit by bit.

Flash ahead to the pool and the latest in a list of things my car doesn't want to do anymore: unlock. The driver's side lock component fell out about a year and a half ago, so as I leave with pool bag and wet hair, as per my habit, I approach the passenger side door, key outstretched. Turn key. Feel unhealthy mechanical release. Button not moving. Turn, turn, turn, turn. No resistance. Turn, turn. Crap! I know, I'll climb into the back seat through the trunk. Can't. get. seat. to. push. down. Crap! Go into building to call AAA. Relent in letting manly man try to help me before I call. Wait for failure of manly man. Thank him. Call AAA.

I list my last three addresses for the AAA roadside assistance operator until she recognizes one in her computer. After learning my dilemma, she helpfully suggests that I may want to get my locks fixed. "And what is your location?" she asks. I've been dreading this question. As usual when I make these calls, I am nowhere. Nowhere I can easily explain to someone sitting at a computer 3,000 miles away in Florida waiting to punch something into her keyboard. I'm in a remote parking lot on a university campus that sits on the grounds of a closed military base. From my state-of-the-art pool, I'm looking out on a desolate scene of boarded up barracks and downed telephone poles. But I imagine she may want something like, oh, a street address. If only I could tell her, "Ya know the exit after the mall, yeah, so take that and where that flashing light is where they just put up the new sign for campus? okay, turn left…" But I can't. I tell her the school. I tell her I'm at the pool. I tell her again. She sounds dubious. It's the pool. The pool. Can't they find the pool? She says the local towing company will be there…waits for the screen to change…in an hour or less. Oh boy, oh boy.

I go to wait by the car. It's foggy and cold and I decide to sit in the trunk to break the wind. I don't often have the opportunity to view at close range the contents of my trunk.
An inventory:
1) one old printer no thrift shop will take
2) one old tire (not spare)
3) one track ball game
4) two empty gallon jugs of water
5) one foam core sign reading "Rubber Chicken Poetry – Yay!"
6) one plastic bag of cassette tapes
7) one canvas bag of rocks
8) one wooden table top Mike sawed in half but never made me shelves out of
9) one beat-to-shit page from a road atlas of the US (southern California)
10) one pair aqua socks
11) one jack
12) one quart oil (10w-30)
13) one pair yellow rubber gloves (??)
14) leaves
15) one bicycle pump
16) one block red clay, used
17) one Russian-English dictionary, paperback
18) one ice scraper
19) one set bike fenders
20) one bottle sunblock (SPF 30)
21) one garden stake
22) me

Other ways to pass time in a trunk with a journal -- Car Haiku! (Play along! Remember, it's 5-7-5):

Jetta, oh, Jetta
Why, oh, why do you hate me?
In your trunk I sit.

The wind is cold here.
Tow truck on the horizon?
Only a mirage.

Bees like my hair gel.
Sitting on pointy things.
Left butt cheek asleep.

It feels like it's been an hour and in checking at the pool office, I discover it's been even longer. Time flies when you're sitting in your trunk. I call again and wait forever on hold. Operator #2 tells me the driver came, waited five minutes and left. I wasn't there. Oh, I'm here. I'm right here. We try again. I'm armed with the building number and the official name of my location the "aquatic center." The operator asks me how to spell aquatic and my heart sinks. I wait 15 minutes past the half hour I'm promised and call my husband. He happens to have the car at work today and can leave a little early. By now, I haven't eaten in six hours. I'm STARVING. There's a banana locked in the front seat of my car. A lovely, lovely banana. I can see its spotted yellow peel, imagine its potassium-laden sugars. I must get to it.

I call AAA for the third time in as many hours and wait on hold. Rachel answers and upon hearing my story is very apologetic. She patches in the dispatcher from the towing company – a woman named Lenny – who is equally bent on pacifying me, crazed preggo with low blood sugar. Lenny checks with another driver and assures me he's five minutes away and knows the campus.

Should I apologize for not having a cell phone? Would that really have mattered in this case? Am I too far behind the times to have a baby? What would I do if this happened with baby? Put baby in the trunk? Tell it stories that begin with "Once upon a time, there was a lovely banana…"?

My husband arrives and starts fiddling. Twenty minutes pass and I call the towing company. I don't get Lenny – if that is even her real name. Lenny is virtual reality to me. Like me, Lenny is nowhere. I get an answering service, the employee of which tells me the driver is probably just "in traffic." "Uh, no, take my word for it. It's not the traffic. He doesn't know where I am." "And do you know where you are, ma'am?" It's like making fun of your family. You can do it, but if someone else does… My location status of "nowhere" drops away from my thoughts in a flash. My jaw crashes to the floor and I am blind with an incredulous hormone-fed rage. "I know EXACTLY where I am!!" At 18 weeks and two days. At the end of my rope. At a precipice from whose height I can't even imagine a drop. Click!

Mike bounds up to me and backs away again, slightly afraid of the look in my eye. From a distance he tells me he got it open.