This is a story of how I very nearly drove our car right into our house – like that famous scene from “Everybody Loves Raymond” – except that in our case there was no laugh track.

We were coming home Saturday night from our Mongolian BBQ outing with Polly, Mark and Lorelai – and I was driving.  As I pulled into our driveway, I noticed a 12-pack of A&W Diet Cream Soda on the floor of the garage.  So I pulled the car in a little less far than normal so we could more easilyi retrieve the soda-  but I didn’t pull the car in quite far enough,  and when the garage door came down it caught on the back bumper.  So I put the car into Drive and inch the car forward just a little bit.   Just as I’m checking to see if the garage door will now be able to go down all the way,  Kathy lets out Bobbi and Ellie through the garage.  Ellie makes it with plenty of room to spare,  but Bobbi sails after her and it looks like the garage door is going to come right down on top of her,  which at the least would have scared her and at the worst might have somehow injured her.   Kathy instinctively lets out a cry “Bobbi, no!”   which causes me to lean out of the car, call after Bobbi, and actually step out of the car . . .

The trouble is,  the car is still in DRIVE!   Kathy immediately sees that the car – now that my foot is off the brake – is moving forward . . . screams something (I’ll just leave it at that)  and I fly back into the car and slam on its brakes just as the front bumper is making contact with our refrigerator.  And I mean the refrigerator in our garage.  But had the car been going faster,  it might have plowed right through the outer wall and into the refrigerator in our kitchen for good measure!   It could have been the most awful awful awful thing. . .  and although I do not know the physics of this scenario,  it felt like we narrowly averted a Lucy and Viv-type catastrophe or worse.   Fortunately,  all we have to show for our near miss is some white on the left corner of the front bumper –  a sobering reminder, nonetheless,  that exiting a car that’s still in Drive is only a good idea if your car is about to hurtle over a cliff.   And I discovered that if you want to learn a lesson and never forget it for as long as you live,  attach a bit of sheer terror plus a healthy dose of thorough embarrassment.   It really does the trick.