Sacred Life Sunday: Living on the Edge....

My life is still consumed by cars. Looking at cars, test-driving cars, evaluating cars, considering buying cars.

I thought I'd found one but it didn't quite work out. It was a cute, perky and clean Mazda Protege. That one went by the wayside when I discovered a problem I was unwilling to deal with.

Yesterday, I went to look at another car. It was cute and perky, too. I liked the color. It had been well-maintained.

The woman selling it showed up in the parking lot at 24-Hour Fitness where we'd agreed to meet. I was in my housemate's Infiniti which makes me look far classier than I really am.

When I took a look at Sally's (fake name, obviously) Kia Sephia, I saw that she'd selectively chosen the pictures she chose to put in the ad. It had no license plates, questionable DMV paperwork and it hadn't been smogged in some ungodly number of years, if ever. (I suspect it was an out-of-state car.) These are all things she failed to tell me when we discussed the car on the phone.

She showed up with her two kids in the back seat. She continually yelled at them the entire time we were together. Loud, boisterous yelling. I'm not sure how to say this but she was obviously low-income. I am not slamming low-income people which would be hypocritical at best, considering that I'm low income, too. But there's low income ~ and there's low income.

She swore it would smog. No problem.

I knew she was full of baloney and decided to put her feet to the fire. I took her down the street with her little car to have it smogged. My suggestion. My expense. It did not pass. It would have been impossible for me to register that vehicle without considerable mechanical work. When I looked through the paperwork at the smog test site, I also realized it was a salvage title. That would have meant additional expense on my part because it would have had to go through a DMV safety check as well. It's not easy to get a car registered, once it's been totaled.

I wished her well and left.

As I drove home, I thought about people who live on the edge. They're willing to drive unregistered, uninsured vehicles. They look in the rear view mirror all the time, hoping they won't see a cop. They don't smog their vehicles. They are the ones who hit people's cars and take off. They are also the types who squat in people's houses, not paying rent. They live their lives always on the edge, courting the next disaster.

Being a person who doesn't like risks that are not calculated to the last infinite possibility, it's hard for me to relate to that way of life.

What's harder to deal with is the blatant dishonesty. Sally's dishonesty. She was hoping I would be too ignorant to recognize the problems. Or perhaps she was hoping that I would just *want* it so badly that I'd accept the problems. (Nope! I'm actually a very hard sell and very pragmatic when it comes to that kind of thing.) Sally is impulse-driven. Want will trump pragmatism every time. If she wants something, that's all that matters. She wanted a few thousand dollars of my money and it made no difference how she got it.

It's people like that who make life difficult for the rest of us. Simple honesty would be freeing for everyone. Tell the truth and let people make their choices. She could sell that car to someone who wants a project car or someone who is a mechanic and they'd be grateful for it.

The stress of living on the edge is rarely worth it. Rules have a purpose and long-range consequences when they are broken. Sally will probably always live that way, puddle-jumping from one crisis to another, trying to get by with as little as possible, hoping always for an advantage.

She had the ad back up within an hour of having met me. She mentioned nothing about it not being smoggable.

It was the best $58.00 I ever spent.

Okay. Very little Sacred Life Sunday content unless you read between the lines. :)


~*