My Big Red Easter Egg

Seven years ago, when I returned home from Cornell after two years as a student, never to return to my studies, I bought a car. It was a used Hyundai Elantra. It was not a fancy vehicle but my father thought it was the right car for me at the time, and so did my then-boyfriend. Last summer I bought a used Toyota Prius. I am a modest environmentalist, and so I decided to buy a hybrid. The Prius, apple-red in color, is a 2008, and had about 32,000 miles on it when I bought it. But the car was in perfect condition. Unlike the Elantra, the Prius did not have a scratch on it. Even the tires were new. It looked like a car right out of the showroom.

I immediately drove the Prius over to my parents, just to show them my new purchase. I gave my father a test drive and he seemed genuinely impressed. It made me feel good. Dad would never actually say, “Katie, you wasted your money on this one,” but if that’s what he was thinking, I’d be able to tell.

My father then gave me a bit of advice. He said, “Katie, it’s a nice-looking car, but don’t bother washing it, and as time goes by, don’t look too closely at the paint, because you are undoubtedly going to find dings and scratches.”

Last Fall I thought about washing my Prius. But I had some thoughts of going over to my parents’ for a visit and I did not want Dad to see me pulling into their driveway in a sparkling-clean Prius. He would probably chuckle and shake his head; actions I really did not want to be subjected to. So the Prius went unwashed.

Yesterday, however, I decided it was time to drive the car into one of those self-use, car wash bays. I figured on vacuuming out the interior, but I thought that while I was there, I might as well do the exterior too.

For a few minutes everything went fine. I was using one of those soaping brushes, running it over the car, when on the passenger-side rear door I found two scratches running parallel to each other, each about four or five inches long. As I glared at the twin scars, I could almost see a shopping cart smacking into the red door, removing the paint. I sighed and continued on. Unfortunately, my heartache did not end there. A moment later I found some deep, black scuff on the outer edge of my car’s rear bumper. I figured it was someone backing out of a parking spot and catching his black bumper on my Prius’s red bumper. It was demoralizing. Truth is; I would have stopped washing my car right there had I not already invested a couple of dollars in the chore.

As I drove away from the car wash, I tried to come up with an analogy to explain the thoughts that were going through my head at that moment. Here’s the best I could do; trying to keep a car’s exterior pristine is a little like painting an Easter egg and then setting it down on a sidewalk at Times Square on New Year’s Eve… don’t expect either the egg, or the paint, to survive unblemished.

I’ll bet when my dad was a kid he never once painted an Easter egg.