Drive

Luca and I were playing Transformers a little while ago.  This involves little plastic robots and Luca explaining in great detail what I am doing wrong at any given moment.

“No, Dada!  That Transformer does not say, ‘I sure could go for a beer right now.’”

After being chastised again for breaking rules only Luca knows, I conveniently remembered needing to move our car for street cleaning.  This involved going down the alley to our garage with the big barn doors that are too much of a pain in the butt to park the car full time. 

I suggested Luca join me.

“No!  No!  Dada!  You said you would play with me!  I want you to play with me!  I don’t want you to move the car!  I don’t want to.”

“Well, what if I let you drive?”

“Yes.  Let’s go move the car right now.”

I positioned Luca in my lap to steer and considered for a moment this was not the safest thing I’ve ever done.  Don’t most auto accidents happen within a block of your house?  If I got hit with a three year old in the front seat, awful things could happen. 

Luca then looked back at me and said, “This is the best day of my life.”

We drove slow.  Very slow.  Slow enough that I thought we were actually more of a danger than if we were going over the speed limit.  We entered our alley we share with US Representative Jan Schakowsky and I thought, “Man, I hope she isn’t currently hosting the Policeman’s Ball in her backyard.”

I stopped the car and swung open our garage doors.  I then attempted to drive our boat of a car into the spot.  I quickly realized our car was half a foot too wide for our garage. 

With a three year old gleefully screaming in my lap, I found myself in a position where I couldn’t drive forward without scraping the left side of my car and I couldn’t drive backwards without scraping the right side of my car.  I was fairly certain I was also in jeopardy of scraping the top and bottom of the car as well.

“Quiet, Luca.  I have to think!”

I figured I had three options:

1)   Carve a chunk out of the car and say Luca did it. 

2)   Abandon the vehicle and say it was stolen.

3)   Inch back and forth for the next half hour and pray Option 1 and 2 didn’t come into play.

Luckily, we made it out of the garage, drove back around the block and parked out front again.  Safe.  I gladly paid the ticket from the city.