Travel Bag

I heard Dave Ramsey, the financial guru, say once that men buy cars for transportation (and, I might add, status) but for women a car is a big purse.  He is absolutely right.  What women, especially if she has kids and drives fourteen million miles a week, well, maybe a little less, like thirteen million, picking kids up from day care and/or school and taking them to music lessons and baseball practice and church and friends' houses in between driving to the grocery store, work, church, the cleaners and countless fast food drive-throughs because she doesn't have time to cook, she is driving for Pete's sake!, what woman has a clean car for more than an hour every six months?  That hour courtesy of the husband who sighs loud enough to be heard three states away, shakes his head and heads off to the car-wash.  Alone, of course, no kids in the car.

Why is this, you may ask.  I'll tell you why.  There has never been an art project made from macaroni and nine gallons of glue on a paper plate that has been sent home dry.  And there has never been a macaroni/glue/paper plate art project that has made it out of the car and into the house without first lying on the floor of the car, macaroni/glue side down, for about a week until someone misses it and wonders why it is not displayed on the front of the refrigerator.  No, it is in the car, glued firmly to the carpet, underneath three lost library books, forty-seven Happy Meal toys, minus the Happy Meal toy that went "Heee-hawww" each time its tail was pulled and the mom said "If I hear that one more time I am throwing that thing out the window!" and she made good on the threat. It's mixed in with ballet shoes, soccer uniforms from last year, folded camp chairs for watching soccer practices, a dozen petrified french fries, a hockey puck that used to be a hamburger patty, empty juice boxes (empty because the juice has oozed out of the cardboard and has pooled into the cup holder in a congealed mass, trapping the juice box like a dinosaur in the La Brea Tar Pits) and backpacks with notes from the teacher that have to be signed right now!  If there is a kid in diapers, multiply the quantity of these things by twenty-seven.

 And don't forget the car seats.  There are scary treasures under the car seats that will never be unearthed until  the kids are studying for their own drivers' licenses.  And don't worry about making sure the car seats are installed correctly.  They are held to the upholstery with something like Super Glue that probably came from one of those juice boxes before the rest of it was left in the cup holder. All of these things are in the back seats.

The front seat has Bibles, Bible study notebooks, grocery lists, re-usable grocery bags, cardboard coffee cups, change, hand sanitizer, movies, both the kind that were supposed to go back to the RedBox two days ago and the ones that you keep in the car if you are lucky enough to have a DVD player for the kids to watch for part of the thirteen million mile journey.  And a purse.

Now that I am a grandma my car is not as full as it used to be but there are certain things that I do keep there. There is a plastic bin between the two back seats that is supposed to hold the Happy Meal toys and markers and color books for the grandkids. Even though I also have a trash can in the front, the toy bin may occasionally get cookie crumbs and wrappers and gooey stuff, or so I have been told by someone who had to stick his hand down in there looking for the car keys once (Oh, just do your big sigh and go on to the car wash with the car if you're going to be that way).

 I also have a built-in bin that has scissors and scotch tape (you never know when you might need to wrap a present on the way somewhere) post-it notes, extra ink pens, fabric samples from all my upholstered furniture in case I need to match something, the DVDs we keep in the car for the kids, and a bunch of change. And an afghan and a small pillow in case someone needs to take a  nap while waiting for someone else to come out of work but he is still in a meeting and it's getting dark!  Or the cat can curl up on the blanket if he is thrown into the garage in the middle of the night for dancing a tarantella up and down the halls while decent people try to get some sleep.  And the aforementioned trash can, usually full of used coffee cups.  Somehow, though, I tend to get a call every week or so saying "Grandma, is my lunchbox in your car?"  It usually is.

I rode in my son Josh's car a few weeks ago.  It was so clean I might have been taking a test drive at a car dealer's. The kids were nowhere around, though.  I'm pretty sure they were in his wife's car.