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Sunday Driver

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Pope Francis, that publicity hog, is getting favorable press again by simply acting like your next door neighbor. You know the neighbor I mean – that smiling, soft-spoken, humble one. The one who commands a worldwide legion of millions and has the ear of God.

This time he’s accepted a 20-year-old donated car and announcing he plans to drive it around the Vatican grounds. This seems to have taken the world by surprise. All the guys who have done the Pope job have had access to a glorious array of wonderful perks. So the position was ripe for some contrary sort to come along and flaunt his common touch. It’s not hard to seem to be a man of the people when the bar has been set so low.

But this one was way too easy. Get appointed to the papacy and people immediately forget that you’ve already lived a long life and have learned to do many ordinary things. Driving a car is not really a big deal. If Francis wants to show some “street cred”, let’s see him change the oil while wearing those white clothes of his. If he can do that and then go celebrate mass without switching to fresh robes, I’ll be impressed.

The article says the Pope’s bodyguards “were amazed” when he took the keys from the car’s former owner, Father Zocca, and “drove off.”

Karambolage!
Karambolage!

But I’ll bet “amazed” is not quite the word. Panicked, yes. Possibly apoplectic. They’re his bodyguards, after all, and the car is a Renault – not known for its crashworthiness.

When Gus turned 16 and started driving, we gave him a birthday gift that still makes me chuckle – a weirdly charming book called Karambolage. It’s the life’s work of a Swiss police officer named Arnold Odermatt whose job it was to take photographs of automobile accident scenes. Every picture tells a story – exactly the kind of story that ran through the Pope protector’s heads when they heard him release the brake and saw the PopeRenault take off.

Ever wreck the car?

103 thoughts on “Sunday Driver”

    1. Sure that counts, Cb, Dale didn’t say it had to be your fault. I have a vision in my head of a deer walking on the hood of a big old American car. How did it happen?

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      1. I might as well beat tim to it, I’m sure he’d advise you to go out and deliberately give the Prius it’s first scratch or dent.

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      2. I was driving along Co Rd 19 near Navarre and suddenly out of nowhere, this buck with a big rack just
        leaped onto the passenger side (hood) of my car. His body then slid the whole length of the car and
        off the trunk. There was a trail of innards along his path. Yuk – hope none of you are eating lunch right now? Oddly, the animal did disappear into the woods, likely to die in privacy. It was a $2500 repair.

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    3. Driving down a NE MN narrow backwoods road at 50 mph, I had a deer hit the driver’s door. That is, from a mathematics/physics point of view, nearly impossible. Just as amazing, that was my only encounter with a deer in all my years driving around NE MN. Amazes me more over the years. Other than that, bumped into something here or there, or bumped into.
      Once in the back seat of a car that was totaled along North Shore Drive as a child. Driver was lighting a cigaret (with a match then) and swerved over and caught the rear end of the car I was in. Spun it into some rocks. My mother’s arm was cut but that was all. The man tried to drive away. My father carried a deputy’s badge, unpaid, and arrested the man.

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    4. Deer are scary. Still remember the Thanksgiving my mother totalled a car by hitting a deer (deer whistles were completely intact though….).

      Officer asked her at the time if she wanted the deer. She was appalled and said no. As it turned out, she probably should have taken it, as she was the only member of the family to get one that year.

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      1. And moose as well. I don’t know if anybody here is a Mythbusters fan, but they did an episode once about hitting a moose (whether you’ll sustain more or less damage if you speed up). They built a moose-analog out of big rings of rubber and than ran into it repeatedly at different speeds (car pulled along not driven by human being). It was unbelievable the damage done… to moose AND car.

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        1. reminds me of a woman I used to work with who brought in the small town North Dakota newspaper and read bits to us.

          Invariably there was a story or 2 about somebody hitting a deer, and it usually ended with “nobody was hurt”, which always raised a chorus of “tell that to the deer!!!”

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        2. The rule for driving in the woods: hit the deer; don’t hit the ditch. Insurance rules are not on the deer’s side. MN kills many deer by car than gun. A few thousand on the North Shore.

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        3. I once saw a moose by the side of the road that was so big I’m pretty sure I could have driven under him. That is, if he would stand still enough for me to do that.

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  2. Just a couple of fender benders – 1979 and 2009. My sister totaled my first car (VW Beetle). I was way too attached to that car. The embarrassing thing is that even though she was lucky she wasn’t killed, I was still upset that she’d destroyed my car. I vowed never to get attached to a car again. 38 years later, I’m feeling dangerously attached to my new (2 weeks old!) Prius.

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    1. thats so hard. i looked at my old honda accord which just turned 200,000 last week and saw a bunch of scratches on the passangers door where the dogs jumped up to greet someone. i may have seen them before but they didnt register. the trunk has scratches that are left from putting boxes on there and sliding them off and there is not a panel on the car that doesnt have a ding. it makes no sense to fix any of as the cars value is totally in the ability to keep the wheels going round. it has been a wonderful car while honda has not been a wonderful company. i hope the prius brings many happy years of the wheels going around and the process of aging is gentle and pain free. good luck. did you name it?

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    2. Lucky you! You get the fun of owning a new car plus the halo effect of driving the greenest car on the road. If you ever cross paths with the pope you can look down your nose at his polluting car.

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  3. Friday the 13th, baboons, better drive carefully today! OT – Don’t know if anyone was up to see it, but the sky this morning was dark and clear and full of exceptionally bright stars; a good start to a cool day.

    I’ve never wrecked a car, but I have owned a car that was totaled by a hit-and-run driver while it was parked. I was standing across the street talking with a bunch of friends and saw the whole thing happen. Very unnerving.

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    1. i love the crisp mornings . thanks for the hint to look outside. it is glorius.
      better to be outside your car watching than inside. it would have gotten hit anyway but at least you were not injured.

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      1. I am grateful for that, tim. We were a group of six or seven people who had just finished working on a community garden when it happened. We were standing there, leaning on our rakes and shovels, chatting. As it happened it flashed through my mind that had I been standing by my car, getting ready to get into it, I would no doubt have been killed. He hit my car at high speed, lifted it (a SAAB 900) up over the curb and pinned it against a lamp post. No doubt in my mind that I would not have survived it.

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        1. I was impressed one winter with how hard it is to get your car wrecked so you can claim the insurance. Our offices were located on a steep hill that was treacherous in winter. When I worked as an editor we had a secretary who drove a heap that she dearly hated. Each day she would park this thing on the steep hill and hoped a car would spin out of control and whack it. Cars right above or below her were smashed, but her POS car was always spared.

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        2. The trouble was, my car wasn’t a wreck. This was a little more than twenty years ago, and it was a solid and well-running car worth much more to me than what the insurance company paid me for it. Besides, the punk that hit me had neither a valid license or insurance, so I had to eat the $500.00 deductible. Took him to small claims court and won, but he never paid a dime. 19 year gang member, and he walked.

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  4. the picture of the vw re flashbacked an incident that i had earlier flashbacked yesterday.
    i was working at the mann frannce ave drive in as the guy who picks ups last night popcorn boxes. i had gotten my buddies all jobs there and while the pay was not good the comrodarie was fantastic. bob chester was never late , ever , for anything. he was on the schedule and it was now 10 minutes past his arrival time. the world was wrong… bob had driven his moms volkswagen bug to work and in the prcess of making his left turn across the traffic he waited for the traffic to pass when the guy in the car facing him left a big enough gap and waved him through. bob thanked him and drove through only to be whacked by the car coing in the next lane which spun the vw 180 degrees and sent it back across a couple lanes of traffic over the curb and cross country 3 blocks across the open prairie into the woods in the distance. bob had been knocked into one of those fully functional not in his right mind states where he drove over bumps and undergrowth until he was far enough into the woods to get the assistance of a tree to stop his forward progress. uninjured, car totaled, he didnt show up for wotrk that day and it took us a couple hours to realize all the hubbub in across the street was from our friends mishap. his mom ended up getting the volvo 1800 that is in my garage today to replac eit so i guess it is memorable in more ways than one. those old vw’s just kept on rolling

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  5. car wrecks i’ve had a few
    but then again
    too few to mention
    my dads chrysler wagon
    just 2 weeks old
    with that way back seat
    with the way backed bench on

    the old t bird that cortina too
    there all gone now
    just piles of scrap

    but man i drove them all
    those pile of automotive crap

    but whats a man
    if not his wheels
    what is true life
    if not curb appeal
    i did it all
    from my garage stall
    i wrecked them my way.

    the 64 chev
    the old jaguar
    i had great visions
    for that good ol car
    the fiat spyder
    with me inside her
    the f85
    but i came out alive
    the riveria
    was enough to scare ya
    old marguis was almost the death of me
    the big black van was nearly death in a can
    but through it all
    i gave my agent a call
    i wrecked them my way

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    1. Happy day, Lisa. Make the most of it. It’s a great day for celebrating. Maybe you should give yourself a birthday present of that Koi tattoo?

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  7. Good morning. I can’t believe I am seeing so many posts so early in the morning. I am a little late getting here this morning and will be back when I have time after breakfast.

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    2. Yes, what the HECK are you all doing up so early? If I’d known, I’d have gotten on after my mom called (long story) instead of trying to get back to sleep.

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  8. I damaged my Ford Ranger pickup when I lost control of it on an icy road. The truck went completely out of control, slowly swung around in a field, and gently tip over on it’s side. There was significant damage to the truck, but I was okay because I was not going very fast when the accident occurred. With the truck on it’s side, the driver side door became an escape hatch which I used to climb out of the vehicle.

    A wrecker pulled the truck out of the field and it had to be towed because it wouldn’t start. When the truck was on it’s side, oil had leaked in the engine cylinders. After the oil was removed from the cylinders by a mechanic, the engine came back to life. There was also some damage to side of the truck that had to be repaired.

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  9. Rise and Crash Baboons!

    Yes, the first time at age 16 when a drunk driver ran a stop sign. It was 7 a.m. and I was on an errand for my mother, going to the grocery store for her. The other driver had stopped at the bar after work the night before and was still somehow going home at 7 a.m. It was the family’s only car, so we were without a car for weeks. This was before MADD or drunk driving laws, so she got off scot free for this.

    The other notable accident was while I was in grad school in the late 70’s. But should I even admit this!? On a beautiful Spring day I was driving along River Road in St. Paul when the green velour running shorts covering the lovely rear end of a trail runner caught my eye. I did not slow down for the upcoming stop sign soon enough and rear-ended the car in front of me. Embarrassing.

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  10. I had one crash when i went through an icy intersection way too fast and a car broadsided me and I did a 360.The car was just dented a little. Husband did the same thing with a new Honda Civic and totalled it. Son scraped the side mirror off his new car just after he learned to drive. Daughter backed out of the driveway and backed up too far and dented our old van that was parked int he street. She also didn’t wait long enough to let the garage door open and knocked the spoiler off the trunk.

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  11. Rear-ended in a VW bug when I was in high school. I was waiting to turn left on a curve so had the steering wheel starting to go left. I’m not sure how I managed to pull to the right when I was hit, instead of into the oncoming traffic; if it was fairies or angels, I’m grateful. Since engine was in back, car was totaled. I even had to go to court to testify (to this day not exactly sure why this ended up in court).

    Also had my old Datsun smashed while it was sitting in a gas station. It was sitting right outside the service bay (had just had tire fixed or something) and the other driver pulled into the gas pumps, his brakes failed and he sailed right into the side of my car. Luckily I was not in the car… but I saw the whole thing happen. I can still see the scenario in my mind’s eye, but it’s always in slow motion in my memory. Of course the other driver had no insurance and was driving on a revoked license – he ended up in jail over it.

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  12. Brilliant choice for a 16-year-old’s birthday gift, Dale!

    Never completely wrecked, I guess, but the year I got my license, I initiated my parents by rear-ending a car at a stop light on Main St… kind of like Jacque but I was looking into a store window. Then a few months later I changed lanes on Third Avenue and ran a car off road into a post – happily it only dented the chrome rim on his headlight (at least I did not “hit and run”). Decades later, I ran a stop sign over in Kenwood and did some minor damage, but don’t remember much about that one.

    OYT (Y=Yesterday’s): I would probably get a really nice looking silhouette of a tree, and would have it done on the instep of one foot, where I can see if if I wear sandals. But on the condition that it that is NOT one of the most painful parts of the body to get poked. If it is, then forget it; they can come and arrest me.

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    1. I laughed at that book as a birthday present too. Did he also get a car, Dale, or was the book in anticipation of him buying one himself?

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      1. He did not get a car, PJ. He got to use the cars we already owned. It wasn’t until he was out of college that Gus got a car from us, and then it was our 1993 Camry – a car he grew up in. We spiffed it up – new radio, tires, timing belt, etc., but it ran like a car with 180,000 miles – with occasional multi-hundred dollar repairs needed. That’s hard to take when you’re young and have your first job – to be shelling out large piles of cash to keep an old bucket of bolts running. He traded it in last week on a new Prius – I did something similar with my father’s gift of a 1970 Jeep Wagoneer when I was 23.

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  13. I’ve never wrecked a car in spite of all those thousands of miles I drove through deer-infested highways while I was woozy from lack of sleep. I did wipe out a gas station pump, though. The day featured a steady drizzle and temps about 30 degrees. I pulled into a gas station in Willmar while driving to hunt pheasants in South Dakota. The whole apron in front of the gas station was a big sheet of glare ice made even slicker by the rain. I put on my brakes but the car blasted right through a gas pump and stopped there (with my catalytic converter inches above the gas tank for that pump). The station was deserted, so I stood around with my hands in my pockets before leaving a note and returning to the road. That was a violation of state law, and I got word that the Willmar cops wanted me to turn myself in. They turned out to be understanding. When a cop car raced to the scene and tried to brake, it did three 360 spins while sliding across the apron. Moments later the cruiser was nearly totaled by the fire truck that slid the length of the apron. My insurance was dinged for the obliterated pump, and that gas station is now modern . . . with big metal barriers to protect the pumps.

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      1. I left my name, home address and home phone. The cops called my erstwife, and she directed them to the motel where I was staying. I came home from a hunt to find a note saying I was a wanted man!

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  14. My first car, a Ford Tempo handed down by my dad, met her Waterloo in a parking lot. I was going to work on a Saturday morning at a tiny branch library that was housed in a horrible, dark, creepy, mostly-empty mall (they have a stand-alone building now). I was driving along the main lane looking for a good parking spot, and a woman drove out of one of the side lanes straight into the passenger side of my car. Dented the door really badly, so that it leaked cold air, which was fun in January. The insurance company totalled the car, since it was pretty old and not worth fixing–I got Kuro a couple of months later, and passed the Tempo on to a cousin who got her fixed up nicely. The worst part of the accident was that even though the woman admitted straight out that it was her fault, that she’d taken cold medicine and was kind of out of it, the cop assumed I was the one who hit her (I was in my mid-20s and looked younger than my age, and kind of punkish–short hair, nose piercing, etc.). We kept correcting him and he kept saying I’d hit her, until we went to look at the actual damage and he finally changed his tune. That’s why when people tell certain stories about the police, I tend to believe them–he certainly jumped to conclusions about my situation based entirely on appearances.

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      1. You know, she did, but it was 20 years ago and I can’t remember what she was called anymore. I always feel bad when I forget the name of an inanimate object. I can always ask a human what his/her name is and animals don’t care if you remember their human-given names so long as they get skritchies/treats, but when you forget the name of something inanimate, you’ve kind of killed their personality. Yeah, I’m one of those writers who has stopped working a piece rather than kill off a character. George R.R. Martin is laughing at me right now.

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  15. I am glad to be back in Trail Baboon’s good graces. I was lost in the web for a few days, and could not find the Trail. Sorry, but recalling my only car wreck still makes me shiver after almost 60 years!

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      1. OK..I was hurrying back from an errand, on a gravel road.The maintainer had just been there, and had left a ridge of gravel in the middle of the road, I hit it, and not being a very experienced driver, over corrected, rolled, and ended upright in the ditch. My one year old daughter was in one of those USELESS car seats.. ( It just hung over the back of the seat, and had a cute little steering wheel.) Neither of us was hurt. i became a very careful driver, and never had another accident.

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        1. that does make you shiver, car seats 60 years ago were a concept not a safety device. i remember the ones my mom would put my sister in. they were like a laundry basket with a coupel wires to prop them up and you could plug them into those new inventions what were they called … oh yeah seat belts.

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  16. I’ve almost always driven tanks (not quite a Sherpa, but definitely in that direction), because my dad is 6’4″ and conservative and I end up with his old cars. I’ve never actually wrecked the car, but there are a long line of dings and dented doors in my driving past. Thankfully, nothing dramatic to tell.

    Lisa, I am pea green with envy of your new Prius, and wish you much joy on your birthday and the coming years driving it.

    Late to the Trail this morning as I was actually Out In the Garden!!!!! We have enough tomatoes that the s&h has been detailed to help get them into jars tonight after school.

    I was going to drive the weeds up to the compost site this morning, but after PJ’s warning, I think I will wait until tomorrow. Those weeds aren’t going anywhere.

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  17. As for the Pope, c’mon Dale, he’s only driving around the Vatican, how much trouble can he get into in .17 sq. miles? And everybody else on the road is most likely a trained chauffeur driving around other clerical bureaucrats, what could possibly go wrong?

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      1. Of course, hitting any one of those venerable and venerated landmarks would probably be a problem… oh wait, he’s the pope, it won’t be a problem.

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  18. Morning–
    Only minor fender benders for me. Although one old car parked behind the shed I ran into with the tractor loader bucket. That popping noise of the rear window exploding is hard to forget.

    Before we were married I replaced the brakes on a car. Since my hands were all grimy I had Kelly take it for a test drive. Except I hadn’t bled the brakes yet. So she got in, puts it in reverse and the car takes off while she’s madly pumping the brake pedal. The car stopped when she bumped into the cement corner of the machine shed. She jumped out and ran off. She remembers me waving my arms and yelling and covering my head with my arms as she hit the shed. I remember my Dad standing there watching the whole thing with a sly smile on his face.

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  19. The first time I loaned my car (Dodge Caravan) to my son-in-law to drive was in a Perkins lot. I watched him back the car into another car, compact sitting lower than the van. At that point he was not used to driving vans and did not know about the blind spot. The owner of the car was coming out. They were pleasant and could see he had done no damage. I have never told him I saw that.
    A couple years ago at a Walgreens at 1 a.m., buying kids Tynenol, I felt a bump, but when I got out to look at the minor fender damage there was no car near me. But a 70-year-old woman got out a car parked with the engine running about 30 feet away. She watched me for a bit and came over and asked if she had hit me. I could see she was very distraught and was still clutching a prescription. I told that she had not done any damage. She was flustered and did not really say much and rushed off. A few weeks later my wife backed the car into a pole and damaged the same place, which we had not yet had fixed. So in the end no foul. My assumption was that the woman was getting something vital for her husband. All just Karma, I guess.

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  20. So, there was the Jeep Cherokee made a couple inches shorter in a chain reaction driving through road construction (Husband’s Jeep – he was then Boyfriend…in his twisted logic he made that one his fault even though I was in Mankato at the time and he was in Minneapolis..). And then there was the grey 1983 Chevy Chevette I was driving in Uptown one rainy day on my way to buy groceries, was going (slowly) through a blind intersection, and was hit on the passenger side by a slow-moving grey 1983 Ford Escort. The other driver and I had a good laugh about our two crap cars of the same year and color hitting each other. Mine was totaled, hers had a broken headlight and a scratch. A gal who saw the accident (and let us use the phone in her apartment since this was before cell phones were ubiquitous) said that accidents happened pretty much weekly at that corner. I was not sad to see the Chevette go, but I was only able to get a replacement because of the very flexible loan options available through the Bank of Grandma.

    OT – I may miss this Sunday’s book club. I will endeavor to get there, but the day’s schedule is going somewhat pear shaped…bah.

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  21. Thanks for all the birthday wishes! Nothing special planned yet but I may be going out to dinner with a friend. Beautiful roses just arrived from son#1.

    Answers to a few questions: I find I’m happier once a new vehicle has sustained a minor ding just to take that “perfect” status down a notch so that subsequent scars don’t hurt as much.
    This car came pre-dinged. Walser had hail damage on almost their entire inventory from a storm a few weeks back. They offered many of their cars with a choice: a hail discount OR have them fix the damage. My car has barely noticeable damage so I took the discount and now that perfection curse has already been lifted.
    It is a beautiful SeaGlass pearl. Like a bit of an OLD Coke bottle washed up on the shore.
    I did name it. (I think my VW bug had a name but can’t remember it. No subsequent car has had one ’til now). It’s called Premie. It’s not a Pri-US because there’s no husband in the picture. It’s all mine, mine, mine so it’s a Pri-ME.

    I was one of the early posters today because a fellow employee in Brussels paged me with an issue at 4:30. While I was waiting for a response on something, I thought I’d check the trail.

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    2. you need to page those people back at the equivilent time to let them understand what the thoughtless contact at the normal time of day for their body clock feels like.

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  22. In 1977 the senior girl who lived next door drove to school every day in her Dart because she worked after school. So I often rode in with her and then walked the 3 miles home on Hwy 61. One morning the roads were very slippery. She was crawling along,not used to driving on ice.We got to the Stewart River bridge (the one right by Betty’s Pies) and a jeep (very dangerous things on ice) spun out coming at us. She slammed on the brakes. Both vehicles did a 360 and hit nose-to-nose. The cars bounced off each other and then came to rest against opposite sidewalks on the bridge. The jeep had a big spare tire on the front. The Dart bumper caught the tire perfectly. No damage was done to either.
    As the cars were spinning the girl gave a shout loud and long: “Shiiiiiiiit.”. She was embarrasses she had done this in front of her teacher, yearbook adviser, and adviser of the student council (She was school president). I promised I would not tell her parents what she said and never did. That day in senior English I was teaching writing, pushing as always my three-word mantra: Precise, Concise, Clear. In her section I just threw out as a joke between the two of us that I had heard her make a very precise, concise, and clear statement that morning. But she had told all her friends. We all laughed long and hard.

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    1. Clyde: someone has actually done research on the last words of airline pilots who see they are about to have a fatal crash. With few exceptions, what they say is, “Oh shit!”

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      2. I remember a lithograph poster from the 70s: a ship hitting something that you could tell would sink it… caption is just two words spoken by the captain… guess what they are.

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    3. i loved the 60 darts but not the 70’s. dodge went boxy and went deluxe with rich corinthian leather about then. i rode to jr high school with a science teacher who lived down the street. never had him as a teacher but he turned out to be a good friend. had some good chats at 7 am every day

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  23. Speaking of cows…
    We used to let the beef cows graze in the fields along the driveway after the crops were off in the fall. One late night my brother is coming down the road in his blue Chrysler Satellite (with the Mag wheels that are still up in my shed) and a cow sleeping on the side of the road jumped up, turned around and ran bang into the drivers door of his car causing a big dent. Brother was mad and he hoped the cow had a headache.

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  24. Younger baboons (which means almost all baboons) might not know what a “Sunday driver” is. In the Fifties in central Iowa, many farmers had scarcely driven a car. They lived on their land and had few reasons to drive around wasting gas. Sundays were different. They had to go to church and then the custom was to “go visitin'” at the home of some nearby family member (and for most farm families, there were offspring or parents living almost within sight). If you were driving on Sundays you were apt to encounter some old sedan with maybe five or six passengers (no bucket seats back then) wandering uncertainly down the road with a terrified farmer trying to maintain a speed of at least 30 mph while keeping the car on the road. That was a “Sunday driver.” If you came up behind them, the wise course was to trail them a mile or two because they surely weren’t going far and you might scare the poop out of them if you passed them.

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      1. i kind of miss the fact that all these connections to bygone days are about gone. the old guys of my youtha re all dead and the people wheo were my teachers are now 80 somethings who are starting to fade. tom brokaws greatest generation is going down hard these days and the korean war era just aint the same. then the boomers . its a progression but i like the connection to a simpler time of the era in the world of the 40s and 50’s. when i got to the uk in the 80s ireland felt like a throwback to the 40’s to me. i havent been back but i would guess it has changed a bit. everything does and ireland became a favorite place to job out computer stuff because they worked cheap like india but spoke english. money entered the picture and im guessing it affected the lost in time nature of the island. i need to get back to see. i sure liked it there

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  25. I have been in a vehicle-to-vehicle contact situation six or seven times over the past 35 or so years, but in every case, both vehicles remained in a driveable condition, so, no, nothing that qualifies as a wreck. I drive far too slowly to wreck a car, I think.

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  26. Hmm. Phyllis MUST be my Mom.
    We’ll know if she recognizes this:
    16 year old new driver backs family station wagon into the brick wall of Sunshine.

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      1. Yes, Kay is the baby that was in the flimsy car seat! Somehow I have lost my connection to Trail Baboon. I did add it to my contacts, and found lots of comments in my spam file. Hope I can get back on the Trail tomorrow!

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