Maybe I should rename this blog "Harvey"

My first car was a baby blue 1983 Chevrolet Citation named Harvey. My brother and I, who were very into naming vehicles for a while, picked the name Harvey because it was about the lamest name we could think of. It summed up the car perfectly.

Like all of my family's cars, we drove Harvey into the ground. I say "we" because Harvey wasn't even exclusively mine; I shared the car with my parents. My folks drive cars for what seems like forever, and Harvey had been around for quite a while before I got my driver's license. By the time I was old enough to slide behind the wheel and lurch that bench seat all the way forward so that my feet could reach the gas (and my breasts could rest on the steering wheel), Harvey was in pretty sad shape. The car shook violently at 45 mph and the gas gauge showed the car to be perpetually full despite the fact that it rarely was. But my father takes some sort of perverse pride in getting his money's worth out of a car, and Harvey was still running, so he was still driving it.

It was pretty rare for a car to hit the 100,000 mile mark in those days, but Harvey (and my father) just didn't know when to quit. One day, about 6 months after I got my driver's license, I had the dubious pleasure of watching the car odometer roll back over to 00000. When I got home and casually mentioned this to my father, he hit the roof. Turns out he'd been waiting for years for the opportunity to see an odometer roll over like that. Who knew? I wasn't sure whether to gloat that the honor had been mine or ridicule my father that he'd even entertained such a silly goal. If I recall, I ended up doing both. My father still curses me for robbing him of that moment and I still laugh at him for wanting it to begin with.

I've been reminded of Harvey's odometer this week as I've watched my my blog stat counter creep toward the 10,000 mark. 10,000 hits is a pretty measly goal; in fact, some A list bloggers probably hit that mark every week. But I'm no A list blogger, and while I suppose 10,000 is as arbitrary a number as any (particularly since I can't even remember how many months ago I started the counter), it's a nice round one and like my father, I was enjoying the anticipation. Yesterday, I "rolled over" the 10,000 mark. And you know what? It was every bit as anticlimactic as watching the odometer do its thing.

Talk about a mini ministone.