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2001-12-29 | 2:53 p.m.

We are in the market for a minivan, it pains me to say. I know it's a total cliche to have minivan ennui, but mine is of a vacillating nature. I thought minivans were cool from the first moment I rode in one. It was my friend Shirl's Toyota and we took it on a road trip down to Key West with Delia and her little girl, Crisis. There was something about that van that made it seem commodious as an RV. It seems like Shirl had taken out the middle row of seats, although I'm not sure it's possible. I do remember taking Crisis out of her car seat and letting her crawl around on the seats and the floor of the van, and I remember that she was lit by sunbeams that filtered through the windows all the way to Key Largo, when the weather turned dull and gray. But I loved Key West and I was having so much fun there I called Brian and he was indifferent to me. I didn't realize it then but now I see that every time we were apart he was trying to talk himself out of loving me. When I got back he gave me a very expensive crystal glass, from our registry, and I was angry because he had spent so much money for no apparent reason. Fifty dollars was a fortune to us and frankly, he never bought me gifts. But he told me later it was because he felt guilty after talking to me on the phone, because I had been so happy and he hadn't even tried to bridge the gap or be happy for me in my happiness.

And not to sound too flippant, but when he told me that, I was like, whatever. Let's face it, I've been the recipient of plenty of those deliriously happy I'm-on-a-trip-and-you're-not phone calls (many more than I've placed) and it never occurred to me to feel guilty for being a crank; for not reciprocating joy for joy or for thinking I might be better off if I were involved with someone else entirely. He always tried to over-invest things with deep meaning---that is, when he wasn't ignoring some other palpably expressed meaning that was leaping at him like a pound puppy.

So anyway, I liked the minivans. When I heard people complaining about minivans, I just thought it was silly, because I was always moving and wishing somebody I knew had a vehicle that would transport large quantities of my shit.

But then I became a parent in a suburban environment where everyone else seems to have more money than we do. And like I always do, I began to equate my own relative poverty (not real poverty, of course, only relative poverty---there is probably a better way to phrase it but I can't think of one at the moment) with a kind of nobility. This tendency reached its zenith one night as we crossed the Bay Bridge and I saw a family driving next to us in an impossibly small and decrepit old car. The two parents were in the front seats and the young daughter, about 9 or 10 years old, was in the back. They were sharing a joke in an animated fashion, laughing and talking excitedly, and you could tell they were poor but it didn't matter because they were cool. It was like something out of Dickens, except with black people. So immediately I decided I wanted to be more like them. That is, able to enjoy my family and my life without fretting over the paucity of my material possessions. And I did do that for a long time. And one day at soccer practice one of the Dads said to me, a propos of nothing, as he stared at the parking lot, I don't know how people do it without mini-vans, and I love my mini-van, not realizing I suppose that the scruffy little 93 Tempo parked at the far end of the lot would be carrying me and my three children home. And I said, "people manage all right." Because they do, damn it. Of course it is hard to cram more than five people into a standard-size car. But the height of existence is not contained in a mini-van and a tract house. It seems banal even to say it, because it seems as if everyone knows this already. Yet here was this fellow, preaching the gospel of the mini-van. And that made me really not want a mini-van, thinking it would make me more like him. Am I the only one who chooses her belongings with an eye toward differentiating herself from the pack? Surely not, but at the same time I do think it's a little childish.

So---long story short---Tempo is on last legs. Have had it in to mechanic's three times and they don't know what is wrong with it. Duff just drove by in a new mini-van, to show me. I'll let you know what happens.

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