Counterfactuals

Today is the anniversary of the theft of "Katia," our Honda Civic, which is kind of hard to believe. If you don't know the story, and don't feel like clicking through the links, the car was stolen from its spot near the Hopkins campus on May 12, 2009, just ten days before Peanut's due date. We went out and in three days bought a new car, then learned just as Sarah was going into labor that the Baltimore Police Department had found someone found the Civic and told the police about it. And then we learned that it was fixable.

It's occurred to me every now and again, and especially this week since it's the time of year that it happened, just how much that crazy series of events changed our lives. Until that afternoon, we had planned to have the Civic as our family car, with the dilapidated (and that's being very generous) Subaru Impreza (aka "the purple car" and other more colorful nicknames) as a backup. The Impreza was a car that neither of us wanted Nicholas to be in on any kind of regular basis. At the time he was born the car was sixteen years old. It only had about 108,000 miles on it, but it showed its age. Plastic pieces were falling apart. The air conditioning and heating only sort of worked. It did not do well on highways. Oh, and it was missing its radio because that got stolen in Baltimore too (about a year before the Civic, but on the exact same block ... needless to say we haven't parked there since).

It's kind of odd to think about what our lives would be like if the Civic hadn't been stolen, or to put it another way, how different things are given that it happened. We had planned to replace the Impreza shortly after Nicholas's birth, so I don't think we'd still have it. (It ended up with Uncle Patrick, and was donated to charity after his high school graduation in June 2010.) But who knows what our commutes would look like. Sarah relies on having the Accord, which has a CD player, to make it through the 55-mile drive to College Park. We're comfortable putting Nicholas in the Civic, of course. But I don't know how we would fit all of his stuff when we travel anywhere, given how small the Civic's storage space is (and seems, in comparison to the Accord). And would we have been comfortable taking so many long road trips in a smaller car with a manual transmission?  Who knows, of course, but I think about these things.

Most interesting, though, is that "Katia" is now widely known as "Daddy's car." That one I totally didn't see coming.