Health & Fitness
Apropos of nothing, here’s a funny story about a car.
It's been a pretty heavy week, so I thought I'd share a funny story about a car I used to own.
After my sophomore year of college, my parents gave me their 1988 Plymouth Reliant. We lived in the suburbs, I needed a car to get a job, and my parents are very kind people. The car was a slate gray four-door sedan, one of the ubiquitous boxy K-cars that defined the late 80s the way softly rounded cloud cars defined the following decade. It had aged well, as K cars did, and though it was well past its warranty in both miles and years, it was in good shape. The vinyl was sun faded, the steering wheel worn pale in a couple of places by years of sweaty palms, but the car was basically intact.
Except for the ceiling. The damned ceiling.
The Plymouth Reliant was only one of many cars with a fabric upholstered ceiling. The trouble with this is that eventually time and weather would take their toll, and the fabric would begin to fall away from the ceiling. It started as a small bubble, near the interior dome light, but before long the whole ceiling was hanging down, sad, like the doughy belly of a retired athlete. I tried numerous things to try and reattach the fabric to the roof, but eventually it always drooped back down, growing progressively worse. It brushed my head when I drove, block my vision in the rear-view mirror, and forced friends in the back seat to duck down. But the worst was yet to come.
