Baby, You Can Clean My Car

When I was getting out of the car this morning I knocked over my purse and it spilled all over the floor of the van. As I was reaching behind the seat to gather up the quarters and dimes that constitute my life's savings, my hand brushed up against something dry and scaly and I pulled back and screamed a little, convinced that I just had my first ever snake encounter. Snakes! In A Car! You know, this movie is coming out, so it is entirely possible.

As I looked closer, though, I saw that it was in fact not a reptilian creature out to eat me whole, but a rather large, burnt french fry. On closer inspection I saw that it was being kept company by several other mummified french fries, a pencil, an unwrapped gumball and what appeared to be an old piece of hamburger bun that had fossilized into solid rock. Funny, but I think I see the face of the Virgin Mary in it, so I put it in my pocket for safekeeping.

I would lie and say that this was an anomaly, that I had fallen behind in my car maintenance and had let things go, just this once. But, in fact, this is the perpetual state of my neglected vehicle, as much a receptacle for trash and old food as it is a means of transportation. Look inside on any given day and you are likely to find: Food items in various states of decay, DVD's and DVD covers (not necessarily matching), cups with unrecognizable liquids in them, broken writing instruments, juice boxes advertising movies that left the theaters months ago, and copious quantities of Starbucks napkins and wooden stirring sticks (Should an emergency arise and someone needs to stir the hell out of their cappuccino.) There is an unidentifiable stain on the floor in the middle aisle - I suspect that the origins of Bird Flu, West Nile and several strains of hepatitis will eventually be traced back to organisms found in this very carpet.

With three rows of seats, there is ample opportunity for trash-accumulating. This and the fact the the girls have a tendency to sit in the back row where I hardly ever venture to do any housecleaning. I fully expect one day to discover a homeless man living back there, comfortably hunkered down between the pile of forgotten sweaters and that bag of clothes I've been meaning to drop off at Goodwill. He will berate me for driving around with such squalor and then thank me for all the half-drunk Jamba juices and spilled trail mix he's been able to live off of for the past two years.

As you can imagine, this doesn't always set well with Rigel. For most men, a dirty, messy car is an abomination, a crime that should be punishable by law. When we first bought the van he would clean it out occasionally for me, falling for my complaints that I was just too busy to be cleaning cars when I had children to raise, damnit. Lately he's given up, though, and will only attempt a minor purging on the weekends when he knows he'll actually have to set foot inside. On these occasions he can be seen making numerous trips back and forth between the house and the car filling and then emptying several grocery bags filled with trash and various other items that have accumulated and turned our seven-passenger vehicle into a four-seater. He usually does this stoically and silently, although he does stop occasionally to give me an exasperated look that says, "If you really loved me you'd throw your empty coffee cups away."

Rigel's birthday is coming up, and I am seriously thinking of surprising him on that day by waking up early and taking the car to be detailed, one of those deluxe jobs where they use a Q-tip to clean the radio buttons and soak all the interior fabrics in battery acid to get out all the ketchup stains. I think that this will be better than those concert tickets I was thinking of getting him, or that guitar even. When he sees the van in the driveway, clean and shiny and without a single Cheeto smashed into the armrest, I'm sure he'll cry real tears.

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