Missed Sunshine

Ok, I finally saw Little Miss Sunshine. If you haven't seen this film yet, go to Fandango.com and purchase a ticket right now. I'll wait. Good. One of the unsung stars of this film is the broken down VW van that the family use to get to the Little Miss Sunshine pageant. The van is a literal representation of the dysfunctional Hoover family and is involved in some of the funniest scenes.

As I watched the VW van on the movie screen, it reminded me of my father's car when I was growing up. It was a 68 Buick Special. And it was definitely "special." It was quite a vision painted blue with a clear coat of mottled rust. The interior was also special. At some point in it's life, the roof liner decided to succumb to gravity and hung down in the center. My brothers and I would argue over who would sit in the middle of the back seat and have to hold the roof liner up so my father could see out of the rear windshield. Despite it's aesthetics, the car was mechanically sound and ran quite well. As long as my father kept gas in the tank.

One day back in 1977, when we lived on Kauai, my father loaded my brothers and I into the Buick for a trip to the store. Back then, Kauai was not the tourist island that it is today. Most of the island was undeveloped. I haven't been back to the island since we moved away, but I guarantee our house is now probably the lobby of a beachfront Hilton resort. We lived off of the main highway (main highway meaning it actually had a traffic light somewhere along it's route) and the nearest store was 10 miles away. About a mile into our trip, the Buick started too sputter and slowly came to a rest on the shoulder. After listening to a string of acidic invectives from my father, my brothers and I sat in stunned amazement. Like I mentioned before, the Buick didn't look like much, but it never broke down on us. We were even more amazed that our father wasn't going out to take a look under the hood. Isn't that what men do when the car breaks down? You curse, look under the hood and curse some more because you have no idea what you're looking at, you just want other people to think you do. But my father was just sitting there quitely pursing his lips and furrowing his brow in contemplation. Afraid to verbalize my thoughts on the situation, I tried to use the Jedi Mind trick to will my father into popping the hood and taking a peek. After what seemed like a Muscular Dystrophy Telethon length silence, my father told us all to get out of the car. I didn't realize it at the time, but my Dad never looked under the hood because he already knew what was wrong with the car. We had run out of gas. He had spent the last few minutes devising a plan out of our current dilemma. His solution? We push. The highway was on a slight grade and my Dad figured we could coast all the way down to town. So my brothers and I got in position behind the Buick while my father was behind the wheel. At my father's signal, my brothers and I began pushing the Buick. It must have been quite a sight for the other motorists. 3 small boys pushing a beat up Buick with an old man in his 50s behind the wheel yelling at us to push harder. All that was missing was the Chariots of Fire soundtrack. My brothers jumped in first and I pushed for about another 20 yards. My father finally told me to jump in and with one deft movement I jumped in and shut the door behind me. My brothers immediately started cheering me and clapping me on the shoulder. The admiration of my brothers had me feeling so euphoric that I didn't care about all the cars honking at us for rolling along at 30 mph in a 55 zone. All that mattered at that moment was that my brothers were in awe of my athletic prowess and I reveled in it. Too bad it didn't last. My exuberence ended with our arrival at the gas station. We had coasted all the way to town like my Dad said we would. But we were on the other side of road from the pumps and my Dad was forced to stop on the shoulder because of oncoming cars. Stuck again. We couldn't push the car across the street, because this time there was a slight grade going uphill into the gas station. My Dad started contemplating again. What did we do? Well, I'm afraid that's a post for anther day.