By Pat Van Dyke
Humor Columnist, Canyon Lake Insider
We’ve been told that when you are getting near retirement, it’s time to downsize. At 75, we like to think that we aren’t old, we just have too much “stuff.”
Seventeen years ago, we did “downsize” where we lived. We moved a street over from our two-story, four-bedroom Canyon Lake home to a one-story, three-bedroom Canyon Lake home. At that time, I donated “stuff,” sold “stuff,” and threw away “stuff.”
But now, 17 years later, once again, I have “stuff”! But this time we are not moving, just reevaluating our “stuff.”
For example, is it important to save your kid’s baby teeth after they fall out? Usually, that Tooth Fairy makes that decision, but for some reason in our house, the Tooth Fairy is “in cahoots” with Pastor Pete and dumps them into Pastor Pete’s top drawer before he leaves our house. Are well-used baby teeth a treasure or “just stuff”?
And then, are the checks that you wrote in 1968 important? Do you have to keep a record of everything you spent? I totally understand the need for keeping tabs on what you paid for rent, gasoline, and food the first year you were married. It’s valuable information that you can use to guilt your children into realizing how poor you were and how good they now have it!
You might need paperwork to prove to your kids that your first home was a furnished two-bedroom apartment rented for $45 a month. The fact that a cup of coffee cost 30 cents in 1968 might not work anymore because your kids and grandkids don’t drink “just coffee.”
To purchase a “cup of coffee in 2022,” you first have to take two years of a foreign language: Starbucks 101 and 102. Only then can you order a Venti Signature Espresso Cappuccino Latte with cinnamon dolce sprinkles, chai, and ristretto. And then if you add Stevia in the Raw, you run the risk of getting arrested for drinking it on a public beach.
We carefully considered shredding this valuable information. You never know who might search through your trash looking for the contract that shows how much paid for a 1970 lime green Dodge Coronet.
With all of this said, we did take one huge step in “down-sizing” this past week. It’s a step that I dreaded but knew that it had to be done. I couldn’t keep “this thing” forever…..but I was trying to discover how to do exactly that.
You see, for the past 14 years, I have owned a Saturn SKY, a wonderful, fast, classy convertible. Not just a convertible, but a roadster convertible. The kind of car that makes you look good and feel great as you drive it. The kind that only seats two people and has a trunk that only holds a couple of shoeboxes if you have the top up and only a few letter-sized envelopes if you decide to take the top down. The kind of car that you see in television commercials traveling down Pacific Coast Highway with sounds of the Beach Boys coming from its speakers and driven by a fashion model who has both a scarf tied loosely around her neck and her hair gently blowing in the wind. I wanted to be that driver! I wanted to own that car!
On our 40th wedding anniversary, I became the owner of a Saturn SKY! It was the most impractical car I have ever owned!
For 14 years, my SKY served me well. It provided a form of classy transportation, but there were a few problems. Going grocery shopping in the SKY was nearly impossible but I convinced Pastor Pete that we didn’t need the “party-sized” bag of chips because we seldom had a party. Besides, the single serving packages were much cuter.
A trip to Costco was out of the question. Pastor Pete didn’t really relish the idea of going down the 15 with the top of the SKY down and me holding onto 24 rolls of Bounty paper towels. Charmin toilet paper was totally out of the question.
Traveling on a freeway while in the SKY was a bit unnerving. Whenever I would pass a cement truck, I held my breath. Traveling past a semi-truck and trailer caused my heart to pound faster than having to dive into the ocean from the end of the pier. Whenever a semi-truck stopped beside us, just the terror of being at eye level with the front axle and having the opportunity to have an intimate conversation with each of the lug nuts was not the experience I was looking for!
And how did “the Beach Boys playing and the scarf around my neck with my hair gently blowing in the wind” work out for me? Not so well! The Beach Boys were fine, but the scarf and my hair were a total loss!
As I traveled, the scarf was blowing so hard that it got tighter and tighter around my neck to the point that it was slapping me in the face every few seconds. And my gently blowing hair? It was more of a hurricane! When I stopped the car, my hair would be so disheveled that I had to quickly put on a hat which made me suffer from “hat hair” the rest of the day. I was nowhere near the image that I had seen in the TV commercials. Instead, I resembled a psychotic villain from a horror movie!
For 14 years, I looked past all these annoyances but six months ago, my body began to react in a negative manner to my precious SKY. I didn’t want to admit it, but there was a serious problem.
Several years ago, I had surgery on my right knee, which along with getting older, made getting into and out of my SKY began to resemble “Mission Impossible.”
To get into the SKY, I would first force in my “bad leg” and then lie across the console with my head on the passenger seat to navigate my right leg under the steering wheel. I was considering auditioning as a contortionist on “America’s Got Talent.”
Getting into the passenger seat was also a problem, but not quite as serious. I would throw all my “stuff” onto the floorboard, position my rear so that I was standing directly in front of the seat, hang onto the door and “plop” down on the seat. My left leg followed my rear with no problem, but I had to lie over the console once again and place my head in the driver’s seat to bring my right leg into the car. It all worked well in the privacy of our garage, but in Costco’s parking lot, it wasn’t too pretty!
To get out of the SKY, I would open the door, throw my cane and handbag on the asphalt, grab the door with one hand and push my body up from the seat with the other hand. When Pastor Pete drove, he would help pull me up, but it felt like being the first pickle being pulled out of a new jar of pickles!
The last few months, getting out of the SKY continued to be difficult but now my body had added moans, groans, and cracking sounds that would echo from the buildings, hills, bridges, or whatever was around. My SKY was no longer getting the attention of the people passing by. My sounds were!
Lately, people walking by have begun to ask if they could assist me in getting out of the SKY which made me realize that I had now reached the point of being “elderly” and was an easy target for a Boy Scout looking for opportunities to earn his Lifesaving Merit Badge. There is something wrong with this picture. It had to be corrected! The only answer was to “get rid of the SKY.”
Driving the SKY to the dealership to be traded in for a more sensible choice of travel was sad. However, when we arrived, several people were waiting near the parking places in which we were told to park the SKY.
As we parked, several of those waiting pulled out their cell phones and began to take photos. I had finally reached the moment that I had dreamed of…..I was getting out of my SKY with a scarf tied loosely around my neck, my hair was gently blowing in the wind, the Beach Boys playing on the speakers, and people stopping to notice. I had reached a “fashion model status!”
But that illusion faded when I asked the dealer what was happening. He replied, “They heard it a SKY was coming in and that it was in amazing shape. They all wanted to see it. In fact, that one technician wants to buy it for his parents.”
I smiled as I thought of his parents attempting to blend the SKY into their lifestyle. Should I warn them about getting in and getting out? Should I let them know that they now must use shoe boxes as their luggage? Should I warn them about the dangers of strangulation if they loosely tie a scarf around their neck? Should I tell them that you can only use premium gas? No, sometimes the elderly have to learn these lessons on their own, even if it takes 14 years!
Prior to joining Canyon Lake Insider, Pat Van Dyke was a humor columnist, reporter, and photographer for a local newspaper for four years. She graduated from Central College in Pella, Iowa, and earned a master’s degree in educational administration from California Baptist University. She was a middle/high school teacher for 20 years and a middle/high school principal for 14 years. Van Dyke and her husband, Pastor Pete, have resided in Canyon Lake since 1977.
