
It’s the end of an era in our family. For the second time in 7 years, I had a car that was originally my mom’s, and had that car brutally totalled in an accident that was in no way my fault. In both cases, the insurance company agreed with me, and in both cases I was given a check that seemed too small to do any real good in replacing the car.
The first time, some of you may remember, my 1988 Accord was rear ended at a traffic light in San Diego. It didn’t take much to total the 12 year-old car, but there was quite a bit of damage, and I was given about $3500 to find a new car. After scanning the newspaper (that’s where you found cars those days!) Kelvin and I trekked down to Chula Vista in search of the 1993 Saturn SC2 that I ended up buying, after bartering the price with a kid who was younger than my Accord had been (his dad didn’t speak English). As it turned out, the car had a very shady title history (having spent some time South of the Border), and most of the passenger side of the car didn’t work (the side view mirror just sort of wobbled, the automatic seat belt didn’t work, and the door didn’t seal properly). But hey, $3500. The car made the trip to Boston and survived over a year here before we decided we didn’t really need a car, and donated it to charity.
This time, it was a 1997 Camry. I had gotten up to go to work, and gone out to the car, which I had parked on the street the night before. I got to the spot where I thought I had parked it, and the car was gone. In its place was another car, along with some car body parts that were the color of my car. At first I was convinced that I just had forgotten where I parked the car (it’s happened before), but after 20 minutes of walking around the block looking, I was convinced that my car was gone.
A call to the police verified that the car had been towed, because it “had been involved in an accident.” According to the Cambridge Police’s incident report, somebody was driving down the street I was parked on when a tire blew out, and swerved into the line of parked cars, glancing off of the car behind mine (knocking the bumper loose), and hitting mine square on the rear quarter-panel. The car was knocked up onto the curb, causing damage to the wheel on the passenger side as well. Since it was then on the sidewalk, the car had to be towed, and since I don’t have a landline anymore, the police had no way to contact me. A couple days later, the car was declared a total loss, and again, I was given an insurance check.
It’s looking like this one is going to have a happier ending than the last one, though, as far as the replacement. Stay tuned…