Jumpin' on Cars

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, because nothing in my family really surprises me anymore, but this particular incident did cause a raised eyebrow (or two)...

"Hi Mom!"
"Yeah...hey, I gotta tell ya a good one."
"Oh yeah! What happened?"
"Well, you know how Grandma goes over to Chris' house to play cards, right?"
"Yeah."
"Well, she kinda had a fender bender with the car again."
"Again? How many has she had?"
"Well...a few," said my slightly amused mother.
"So what happened?" I asked and prepared myself for what was sure to be a doozy.

Grandma got a phone call from her best friend, Chris, who invited her and Ruth over to play cards. This "meeting" was darn near a daily routine for the three women, the youngest being in her 60's and the oldest in her late 70's. They'd sit around Chris' kitchen table and play poker and pinochle, eat authentic German food, gab about this, that and the other, and drink (sip in Grandma's case) their favorite spirits: rum & coke for Chris, Budweiser for Ruth, and Bailey's for Grandma. They usually played cards all afternoon...and into the evening...and more often than not, into the middle of the night. It was not uncommon for Grandma to get home around two or three in the morning, and then stay up a bit longer and bake bread or goodies. This baking in the middle of the night used to drive my Dad nuts, because Grandma's kitchen was right below my parents' bedroom, and the smells would waft up through the heater ducts. There were many nights Dad would get out of bed and go downstairs only to be met by Grandma with the heel of a fresh baked loaf of bread smothered with butter and jam. She kind of figured she'd better cut her son-in-law in on the treat as payment for disrupting his sleep.

This one particular night, as my mother tells it, Grandma was driving home from Chris' house and she kind of hit the stop sign at the end of Chris' street. But that wasn't all. Apparently, she also bent the hood of her car so it looked like a tent (think upside down V). And she knew if she brought her car home with the hood sticking up that my Dad was not going to be happy about it. It seems he'd recently done a major bondo job on the front end and admonished her to "be careful"--a statement many of us in our family have heard before. So rather than drive her tent, uh, I mean bondo job, no wait a sec, oh yeah, car home and fess up, Grandma did the next best thing. She turned her car around and parked it in Chris' driveway and then crashed on Chris' couch until later that morning.

LATER THAT MORNING

To this day, I'm still kind of fuzzy on a few details about what happened next, especially the part about how my Grandma managed to drive her car home without a) being able to see out the windshield of the car due to the tented hood, b) getting stopped by the cops, and c) hitting something else. All I know is she somehow managed to get her car home AFTER my Dad left for work that morning, because she really didn't want to have to explain to him (again) what happened. And then she woke up my Mom.

"Junie, I need your help!"
"What's the matter?"
"Just c'mon out here and take a look."
"Ieyeyeye, Mom! What'd you do!?!"
"Well I think I kind of hit the stop sign over at Chris' house."
"Whaddya mean you think you kind of hit it? Kind of looks like you did, huh?"
With head lowered a bit, Grandma replies "Yeah, I did...but can you help me figure out what to do with it?"
"I dunno Mom, this is kind of bad" my Mom answered as she tried to figure out what to do.

Then my Mom got this idea...

"Go into the house and get the step ladder" Mom tells Grandma.
"Whaddaya gonna do with it?"
"I don't know yet, but I'm working on it."

YOU DID WHAT?!?

While my Grandma's in the house searching for the step ladder, my Mom does what can only be described as a brilliant flash of genius. It definitely wasn't stupidity, because my Mom's not stupid, and in this particular case, it was more important to her to a) not cause undue stress or phreak out my 70-plus-year-old grandmother and b) get the problem solved before my Dad found out. So my Mom climbed onto the very top of Grandma's car, got herself into just the right position, and...

...jumped on the hood.

She managed to flatten the hood perfectly; then my Grandma showed up with the step ladder.

"Hey, how'd you get the hood flat?"
"Oh, you know, I just kinda lifted it up and down until it flattened itself...you know, it's kinda heavy, what with the weight and gravity and all...whaddaya think?"
"Looks good to me!"
"Isn't that your phone ringing?"
"Yeah, I bet that's Chris wanting to know if I'm coming over later."
"Hey Mom."
"Yeah."
"Be careful. I don't want to have to explain this to Gale, OK?"
"Yeah..." giggled my Grandma "...OK."