Riding in Cars with Marge

Happy Mother's Day to all who are mothers, have mothers, or have made someone a mother. I'm reposting one of my favorite Marge stories for your Mother's Day pleasure.

Marge, on left, and pal

My mother Marge has been a continuous (yet unintentional) "sauce of entertainment" to the sane members of my family over the years. She comes out with the most inane and ridiculous things and always at completely inappropriate times. (A recent example of this was posted here, but long-time readers of this blog are quite familiar with this trait.)

When we were kids, she loved bragging to us about what a popular teenager she was, how many guys were after her, and how she was the first girl in her neighborhood to drive and own her own car. She'd go on ad nauseum about how many hands she had to slap from her knee while driving.

The love of cars and driving is something that she and my father Sal had in common. As such, on my dad's paltry mailman salary we always owned brand new vehicles ("You don't want to buy someone else's headache!") which my father would eventually plow into the trunk of a car he was tailgating. (Once he did it on the way home from the dealership. At 10 years old, I felt very much like Ralphie in "A Christmas Story" as I was simultaneously shocked and thrilled by the stream of obscenities that followed.)

Fast forward to the point in their lives well after they had moved to Florida. They were in their 70s, driving a gold-package Ford Crown Victoria (or, "The Police Car" as we liked to call it), with my two nephews in the back seat (15 and 13 years old at the time). Sal was driving with Marge riding shotgun. Cruising down I-4 at 85mph, they had the front windows open all the way and big band music was blaring. When the wind inside the car reached gale force, my mother turned around to my nephews and yelled, "HEY...ARE YOU KIDS GETTIN' A BLOW JOB BACK THERE?"

I guess we know why she was so damned popular in that car of hers!