Shifting From Park To a Low Idle

(From the WP version of News From Hawkhill Acres)

One spring ritual around here is the April visit to the Dodge dealer to get the ol’ Durango sorted out after a season of driving up and down the rutted washboard formerly known as our private road. It was great when the warranty was still in effect, but the odometer hit 100K in March, so this time we’d have to pay. I was going to skip the whole thing, but then we got a safety recall notice on it, so the geek, who works nearby, dropped it off one morning.

I had his weak excuse for a vehicle, which is even more decrepit now that I backed into it last weekend. In my defense, he’d parked it within two feet of my rear bumper, almost blocking me in between it and the garage. But in his defense, it was one of those deals where I came out, looked at his car behind mine, got into my car, started it, looked in back of me and crashed right into the sucker.

How I could miss a whole car is troubling, unless you take into account that I was being yakked at by a ten yr old who just got “Disney Friends” for the Nintendo DS and has to tell me all about Stitch, Pooh, Dory and Simba’s doings whenever we get into the car. Why she saves it up until then is a mystery to me, as is so much of my interactions with other people, including Geekdaddy’s surprisingly gracious reaction when I went in to tell him that the Durango’s trailer hitch had gouged several huge holes in the Taurus’s front bumper.

His only concern was that the airbags hadn’t gone off and once I assured him that they hadn’t, he gave it a brief, unconcerned look and went back to blogging about union matters and Daughter and I went on our way to town.On our way, we picked up the mail and there was the recall notice for the Dodge. And that’s how Geekdaddy ended up calling me the next Monday afternoon to tell me that there was a little problem with my car.

“Well, it’s not unsafe anymore,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it couldn’t get any safer. It’s so safe that you can’t possibly get into an accident, because you can’t drive the thing. They can’t get it out of Park.”

He went on to tell me that the head mechanic was working on it, but if he couldn’t get the shift to move, the dealership would rent a car and deliver it to the geek at the computer mine where he works. However, about an hour later, he drove into the driveway in the Durango. Obviously, there’d been a paradigm shift. Or a shift of some kind.

He said the dealership had called another dealership or something and had figured out how to get the shift to move out of Park without stripping any gears or shredding any metal, which is a good thing when you’re dealing with transmissions. No harm was done. There was no charge and the Dodge was once more fit for duty.

The thing I found the most ironic about the whole thing has to do with the reason we brought it in. The safety recall was to fix a problem that Durangos have with jumping out of Park. Odd that the repair seemed to create the opposite problem of not being able to get it out of Park at all.

There’s probably some kind of deep message there, I’m sure, about balance or yin and yang or something philosophical like that. However, I don’t have time to go into it right now, because I have to call the Dodge dealer and ask them to come tow my car in so they can get it out of Park, where the shift is stuck apparently permanently, albeit it safely, in the driveway.