What A Difference A Decade Makes

It occurs to me yesterday as I spent 5 hours cleaning the foulness out of the inside of my mini van just how much my life has changed since adoption. Prior to 2000 I used to own the above sporty, red car. Oh, how I loved and pampered that baby! The auto detailer came to my office every other month to tweak it's perfection.

I will admit I got a few speeding tickets motoring in this baby.

Only because it was red.

Now I own this:


I had to trade in my red baby for more cargo space. I needed room for 1 to 3 car seats, a couple of wheel chairs and a few strollers at one time. I had to order one with a bench seat in the middle to accommodate The Boy when he looked like this:


Which was every six months or so although I admit that even when he was able to bend at the waste I could barely squeeze him into the red car.

As I cleaned the purple crayons out of the sliding door tracks, the Pediasure off of the ceiling liner and scraped the melted gummy bears out of the seat belt buckles with a bread knife I couldn't help but ponder how my life has changed in a decade.

Now the only thing I get stopped for in my white mini van is expired auto tags because I'm too busy to remember my own birthday.

I used to look like this:

Me and my buddy, Tim. RIP sweet friend.

Now I look like this:




Wendell Berry said, " The past is our definition. We may strive, with good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it only by adding something better to it."

Somewhere between mourning the loss of my red car and burrowing through the petrified forest of dead nuggets and french fries two things occurred to me.

First thing being that I've added something much better to my life during the past decade.

Second thing being that I'm going to offer my neighbor across the street twenty bucks to finish the outside of the mini van.