What's in a Name

 I'm here to tell you that Sheila, Mark's car of 20 years, has died [more precisely, has been donated to public radio, but the fact remains that she no longer runs].

Mark was starting his drive home from St. Louis when Sheila just...stopped. He started her up again, and she reasserted her stationary status. He did a manual override to get her off the road [ie put her in neutral and rolled off to the side down the hill], and then called a tow. 

And thus began the search for the ideal car. [Unfortunately, I don't think cars, or people, have achieved perfection on earth, but the pressure to find the closest-to-perfect still exists]. It needed to have safety features like a backup camera, curtain airbags, and superb crash test results. I stipulated that it needed to have air vents to the rear seat, as I had noticed that Nathan can get warm sitting back there in his carseat. We preferred a hybrid, for environmental and gas-price reasons. The car also needed room for his stroller in the trunk, and of course it needed to be something we could afford.

This is not the car we chose. But it's a pic of A car

Finally, we settled on the Toyota RAV4. We figured out how to pay for it. The last step, which took weeks, was figuring out what to name it.

See, we had to name it, because it would be the car I would drive with Nathan [because it was safer than our other car], which sort-of made it my car...but the remaining car we had was originally my car, so calling either of them my car was both accurate and indiscriminate. Neither had names. Now both needed names.

We thought about Pasta [for RAVioli]...briefly...but settled on Tom. Toyota Tom has a nice ring.

And finally, after 15 years nameless, the other car is now Phyllis. Phyllis is a pain to fill, because she has reflux [okay, that's not actually a diagnosis that cars receive, but she really does reflux gas every few gallons while pumping gas. The mechanic I took her to didn't know what the problem was, so it just has been an inconvenient quirk of that car].

We did not do a naming ceremony.

Cars aren't people.

Despite having people names.