I am officially my dad. Shame. Shame.
As I backed the car out — in a light drizzle, in a parking lot with seemingly endless room, with plenty of light and with no glaring dangers to be seen — it happened.
Crunch!
Or did I feel it first? A little jolt to the vehicle.
Ooops!
And disbelief. Was I just struck by an iceberg? A meteor? A missile?
Because I didn’t just back into something. No, I did NOT just hit another vehicle! Because I don’t do that. I don’t have those kinds of issues. The Backup Bomber! No, that’s not me.
That’s my dad.
Yet … well … there it was. The big dent in the back hatch of my vehicle. The over-sized, heavy-duty bumper on the 14-mile long pickup truck behind me still in mint condition. I could hear it laughing at me. “Not even scratched, and look at your car. Like you got hit by a train! HAHAHAHA!”
The humiliation. The horror. And after all these years of making fun of my father.
My dad used to have a knack for backing into anything, and especially those yellow parking poles that stick up out of parking lots for the sole purpose of sending poor suckers to auto collision centers. I have a theory that body shops actually install those poles to drum up business.
And my dad could hit a yellow parking pole when there wasn’t even one for miles around. They had a knack for appearing out of nowhere — like parking pole ghosts. BAM! The rear end would crumple around it.
My brother and I used to make fun of him. “It’s not like traffic lights,” we would say. “Yellow doesn’t mean speed up.”
He hasn’t hit one, or anything for that matter, in years. Family shame converted him to ultra-safe backup man. In fact, I don’t think he backs up at all. Only pulls forward. If he has to reverse, he just abandons the vehicle and buys a new one. Better than having to face his two sons with another dent and a yellow streak tattooed across his car.
Which makes my little scrape all the harder to stomach. The shame even worse.
My car is fixed. The crumple is smoothed out. My wallet is lighter, and I’m conscious that the curse — or maybe those wicked Thompson backup genes — is alive in me. So I’m uber-aware. Surveying the parking lot before I even get in the car. Checking every direction 14 times before I consider gearing into reverse. Moving so slowly that grandmas scream out the window, “MOVE IT, GRANDMA!”
But I don’t care. I have more important demons to conquer. I have great shame to overcome. I can’t become the second-generation Backup Bomber. I must live this down. I must ensure it never happens again. And if I even see one of those yellow parking poles, I’m abandoning the car and taking up walking. I would never live that one down.