Car stuff

The service manager at the Memphis Subaru dealership called a few minutes ago with the estimate on our repair and - wonder of wonders - it came in about $500 less than I expected.

The work is expected to be done Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning, Now all I have to do is find someone to give me a lift to Memphis to retrieve it.

In the meantime, Maria is driving the del Sol to work and grumbling about how much she dislikes my little 2-seater which, by the way, almost killed me Saturday morning.

We were taking the back way down to U.S. 63 rather than go through town. About a mile this side of U.S. 63, there is a right-left S-curve on Nestle Road. The weather was misting intermittently and the pavement was a bit on the slimy side.

I went into it a little faster than usual and suddenly found myself in a slide with the back end coming around to the left. As I fought to recover and keep it from turning into a 180-degree spin, I glanced up and noticed a pickup truck approaching on the other side of the S-curves.

With deep ditches and utility poles on either side, the option of running off the road was pretty unattractive. But it looked for a moment like this might be the end of my '94 del Sol.

I overcorrected, and the back end swung around to the right, then back left, right, left in a series of oscillations of decreasing amplitude until the car steadied out just in time for the curve to the left. By this point, I had scrubbed off enough speed that the car tracked around the left turn without incident.

So I escaped with nothing worse than an adrenalin rush. Maria was following in the Subaru and seemed impressed with my ability to recover from the slide.

They say that you don't rise to the challenge in a crisis - rather, you default to your level of training. In my case, that would be the experience of driving in 46 snowy, icy Indiana winters. When I was a kid, we used to do all kinds of crazy shit on snow-covered streets and parking lots and got pretty good at initiating and recovering from slides.