THE CLOWN CAR

This is my cute little car. I love it, I really do but it has a sense of humor and is a real jokster. It has been on loan to Lord Bumhampton and Nurse Giggleswitch for a couple of years and so I almost forgot what a funny little car it is. For instance, it looks powerful, doesn't it? It will climb mountain roads that other cars tremble at, but it takes four days to go from zero to sixty. And then you have to be going down hill for about four hundred miles.

It has had three--at least--new ignitions installed as it gets in a snit and grits it's gears and when the key is inserted it ignores it. It won't even let the key turn.

We haven't been able to open the trunk for about three years. It feels like a child stuck a tiny little rock into the key slot but you never know. The Trickster car might just have turned the tumblers all by itself.

And the door locks? That's its favorite joke. You are supposed to be able to lock either the drivers side door or the passenger side door and...zzzing, all the doors lock instantly. Not so. The drivers side door locks only that door. The passenger side sometimes locks them all, sometimes unlocks them all but sometimes only itself. Unless you slam the door so hard that people in houses two blocks away report earthquakes. Then, sometimes it locks everything.

The other day I was doing the routine:

• Lock the back door, manually.
• Close the drivers door and lock it with a key.
• Walk to the passenger door.
• Lock the back door, manually.
• Close the passenger door and lock it with a key. Everything should be fine.

Zzing--lock. Then Zzing, zzing, zzing. The doors, ALL OF THEM, unlocked, locked and unlocked. I locked that door again, thinking okay, it's going to lock everything again. Not so. Only the passenger door locked, leaving all the other doors unlocked.

• So, I locked the back door, manually.
• Closed the passenger door, locked it.
• Walked to the drivers side, opened the door, locked the back door, manually.
• Closed the door and locked it with the key.

Everything locked tight. I smiled. Turned to go and "Zzing, zzing, zzing, zzing, zzing...I lost count of how many times EVERY BLOOMIN' DOOR LOCKED AND UNLOCKED and in the end everything was unlocked. The key wasn't anywhere near the door and neither was I.

And so it goes, the cute little red clown car. We have a affair of tolerance going on. It gives me much amusement and I restrain driving it off a cliff and jumping out just before it goes over the edge. But I talk about doing it when I'm driving just to give it a thrill.

PS The car's antics now explain Lord Bumhampton's recent facial twitch. I'm beginning to feel a twitch coming on, too.