Whoops! Gardener’s equipment threw a rock up and took out my passenger side window. We’ve known Jaime for 10 years and he’s a businessman; he’s paying for it. He told me about it, in fact; I wouldn’t have noticed until later and never suspected him. He’s a Good Egg. So the substitutemobile is resting overnight at Tustin Acura and tomorrow they fix it. Apparently the expensive part is the time they spend very carefully making sure that there’s no more bits of safety glass in the door mechanism rattling around messing things up. Glad I’m not paying, though.

I was driven home by Alfredo, whom I’ve had this ride with before, and we talked about life and cars and kids and stuff. He’s a really solid guy.

When I was a kid and we were living in France we went for a week’s drive around the Loire Valley seeing old stones and stuffing our faces. We had a rental Renault. It was hot as hell most of the time, and one day there was a cold front and a big thunderstorm, and icewater rained on us. The windshield basically exploded as we were driving; at first, my dad thought someone had thrown a rock.

We pulled into a tiny Provençal hamlet with about 8 houses in it and went to the gas station. The classic ancient Frenchman with the huge grey mustache and beret shambled out and inspected the Renault. “Ah.. Pare-brise”, he announced. He led us into the back where they had stacks and stacks of windshields for just about every possible French vehicle and selected ours. The whole thing had the air of routine.

French technology in 1979 could build nuclear power plants but apparently tempered glass was beyond them. For the rest of the trip we had diamonds dripping out of the air condition vents in a shimmering drizzle.