Monday, July 14, 2008

Seatbelt Mania

My wife and I grew up in the 70s. Seatbelts were something you pushed between down deep between the seats so you could squish a couple more kids into the back seat. I was one of four kids and there was no such thing as a mini-van. For most of my life, all four of us squished into the back seat of a two-door sedan. If one of us brought a friend along, the smallest kid was thrown on top of the rest of them.

We camped a lot. We had a pickup camper that sat in the back of dad’s pickup for the summer. Mom and dad sat in the pickup and the four of us, plus friends, hung out in back. There wasn’t a seat belt in the entire rig. The closest thing was an old road we used to dry out towels. As we drove if one of us kids needed something or if mom needed to make lunch, we climbed through the little window between the camper and the pickup.

Fast forward to now. We have a mini-van that claims to seat eight. We have booster seats and car seats galore. Although there are only five of us in my family, we don’t feel comfortable taking along more than two of the kids’ friends because of the size of the booster seats. My dad would have taken all the seats out of the back and piled my family and all of my cousins too.
We were backing out of our driveway and my wife hadn’t clicked in her seatbelt yet. The belt was in her hand. Clicking was eminent. She screamed at me to stop the car. I thought I ran over the cat. No. She just wasn’t clicked in yet. She was almost clicked in. She would probably had been clicked in by the time we reached the street but just not yet.

5 comments:

Voyager said...

Your blog is very funny. A little grammar editing is necessary, but definitely not much. Your writing style is fantastically blog worthy - very open to audiences with good senses of comedic timing.

Thanks for commenting, by the way. My mom has been unemployed for a little over two years now and my dad died of cancer a long long time ago. I'm really working on my grades. Hopefully with some of my directed studies and my intense community service hours I'll find some scholarships. The HOPE scholarship of Georgia definitely is not what it used to be.

Khalid said...

This reminds me of all the times my Dad told me about the "good old days" of his childhood, how they had little but were happy.
Anyway, that was a funny read. and Thanks for commenting on my blog.

Ashley Evelyn said...

i just love your writing voice- i think it's got such a great tone...

it's weird how things change; my mom was a kid in the 60s-70s and she still doesn't wear a seatbelt (she clicks it behind her & sits on the strap to keep the alarm from dinging) & i can't help but click it in a flash...

...and i can distinctly remember being 3 years old & refusing to wear mine (ONCE) & she slammed the breaks & let me hit the dashboard, in an effort to teach me to wear it!

i used to "drive" on my parents' lap when i was little, but that's unheard of today- i think slipping through a camper window sounds risky- and exciting!

MYM said...

LOL ... not a lot of serious accidents happen between the top and the bottom of the driveway ... but to be honest, I haven't looked at the statistics on that one. ;)

JeaneBee said...

When seat belts first came out, my husband refused to clamp it around him. "I can't move with this thing on"....my how times have changed.

I, too, remember putting my little 2 year old on my lap and letting him "drive"....wonder what Judge Judy would say to that!

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http://superseniorsrock.blogspot.com

JeaneBee