Use Your Imagination

Foreword
After work today, walking across the parking lot to my apartment, I passed a minivan with a Jovita's bumper sticker on it. And another little, tiny one, with fine black print on a white background, that I couldn't make out at all.

I had to walk right up to the van and bend over at the waist and squint to read it. It said,

"This is the smallest bumper sticker you have ever seen"

The Actual Blog Post
This afternoon a coworker was telling me that his grandson got a motorized car for Christmas. Not a remote-controlled one, but a big toy car he can sit in and drive around in his driveway.

When I was little, I had a cardboard box. It was supposed to be a VW Beetle. I'd cut out the top and taped on a cardboard windshield and steering wheel, colored the whole thing with blue crayon, drawn tires on the sides, stuck some old keys into the box next to the steering wheel, and hung my dad's expired license plates on the front and back, which added a nice touch of realism. And do you know what?

I'd much rather have had a real car.

Actually, I can vividly remember feeling disappointed in my imagination when I was small, because Sesame Street and Mister Rogers and The Electric Company were always saying that playing pretend was just as magical and wonderful and fun as if the make-believe things were real - but it never was. Upending all the kitchen chairs and scrambling over them was not as good as climbing a mountain; a one-inch plastic lion was nowhere near as exciting as the real thing; a cat made a piss-poor substitute for a horse (as, indeed, the cat would be the first to point out); dolls weren't as lovable as real babies. Not even Baby Alive, which ate and pooped pink goo.

Granted, when something you wish for comes true, it's often not as good as you imagined it would be. But that doesn't matter. A mediocre reality trumps a great fantasy any day of the week.

Now I have a 1992 VW Golf - which did, I'm pleased to say, make it to San Antonio and back without incident. But the screeching-belt sound it used to make only on turns, and only when the engine was cold, now seems to be more or less constant. This is a little embarrassing. I've been trying to pretend it's a really cool car for some time now, but either my imagination or the clutch is going to give out before much longer. Maybe I'll ask my coworker if his grandson would be interested in a trade. Failing that, maybe my dad still has my old Beetle in a closet somewhere. I think a cardboard box probably has a better chance of passing inspection than my car does, assuming the mechanic has a good imagination.