By Esther C. Baird
First published in the Tri-Town Transcript Dec 18, 2019
Well regular reader, I have some sad news to report from casa Baird. We had to say goodbye to the Giant Sparkle, my favorite car of all time and our minivan of 10 years. Silver, loyal, large. I will never love a car as much, but it was no longer reliable, though it tried its best.
The Giant Sparkle lived in Beverly and Boxford and carted the girls around when they were still in car seats. It carried Blue Ears and Moose when they were just weeks old. It played every VBS song that’s ever been written and hours and hours of audio books. It ran music off my first iPod and my first iPhone. It knew the lines to all 175 minutes of “The Sound of Music.”
It remembered going through tolls with no EZ Pass option and when it used to carry around paper maps. It went to weddings and funerals and around and through New York City by every route possible (it hated the Tappen Zee Bridge the most). It was laughed in, cried in, thrown up in and one time flooded by a strawberry milkshake just outside of Philadelphia. It enjoyed many starring roles and cameos in this column, but mostly it was totally and completely lived in.
There will never be a party quite like the Giant Sparkle party.
A few years ago, I began to shift away from the Giant Sparkle for my daily car as we attempted to preserve it for our summer road trips and, some day, a licensed, driving, teenager. We went through our Snow Crusher phase, a mini-Cooper which was like driving a matchbox and, in <span style=”color: var(–color-text);”>retrospect, downright ridiculous. And more recently the Dancing Comet, a Volvo crossover that could fit two dogs and two teenagers if all four creatures enjoyed each other’s company.
But when the Giant Sparkle went to that great big open road in the sky, I knew my truth.
“I really only like minivans,” I declared.
Everyone blustered.
“But you’re almost there! You’ll have a licensed child in just a year!! You’re done with the minivan phase! You have a Volvo!! You can’t go backwards!”
Oh, but I can.
Only minivans have enough cup holders, plugs and space. I like to have a water AND a coffee. I carry a phone AND a purse. I like to have immediate access to my sunglasses AND a chapstick AND (not that I’ve returned to my very bad habit) perhaps some gum.
My other cars-that-were-not-minivans offered a neat and sanitized life where apparently you only drink one thing at a time and never need to access your wallet at a drive-thru. They were streamlined cars where if I had to carry a tray of cookies for a sports team AND a laptop, that was asking too much. Sleek and proper vehicles where if I had to bring a change of clothes that I could quickly hand to a hysterical child without opening the trunk, I had, apparently, not arrived.
Consider me not arrived.
I want not one single second of debate about who gets to charge their phone. I want not even a whiff of concern if I have two 100 plus pound dogs and two teenagers with their luggage for a road trip during which I also want to eat and hand out snacks!!
Oh and you know what else I want? Analog.
Give me a button I can touch with my real hand, a dial I can turn without taking my eyes off the road. Please spare me the space age computer that can calibrate my heat seat after I flick through a few screens that are nowhere near where I should be looking. Count me out from the wait for the <span style=”color: var(–color-text);”>computer and its bevy of screens to initialize while my daughter is flicking the same screen trying to change her temperature resulting in an overly wrought car computer. And I’ll take a hard pass on the fact that during this temperature tussle, no one can change the music because, you guessed it, same screen, same computer.
Handling three whole things at once is hard, so I can see why that’s a problem for the fancy car computers of this modern era, but guess what…it’s not my problem anymore!!
Nope! Because now I’m logging all my miles around the North Shore in a brand new, all wheel drive, ice-white, minivan named The White Whoosh. Flag me down for a ride, and bring your coffee if you want, because there’s plenty of room and it’s still a party! RIP, Giant Sparkle. You not only served as a great car, you taught me that being a mom in a minivan is who I am, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.