The car, the telephone pole, and the Blake

Last post, I briefly mentioned an incident involving our new car and a telephone pole. Let me elaborate.

Picture it: a whole country of people who back into parking spots. In driveways, on streets, in big parking lots. Everyone backs their cars up rather than pulling in front-forward. It's one of those little things that indicate you really are living half a world away in a completely different culture. The cars even beep inside when you're in reverse (inside, but not outside).

I have never been good in reverse. I will do basically anything to avoid reversing into a parking spot and/or parallel parking. When Tim, Dana and I visited St. Augustine, I drove, and asked Tim to parallel park the car for me. A tiny Honda, and I was afraid to parallel it. Now, I live in a country where backing yourself into minuscule parking spots is a daily occurrence. Of all the problems I anticipated, this was not one of them.

Luckily for me, though, I was  not the one to have the first incident. Let me preface this by saying the car title has not been transferred yet. The car is not even yet in our legal possession. We have been driving it for less than a week.

Okay.

Blake and I are kind of unique in that we've wanted to come to Japan for years. We've been dying to live overseas and are eager to take in as much of the culture as we can. For Blake, that meant parking the Japanese way.

He is the best driver I have ever seen. The man has a gift for reverse, a skill I can never hope to come close to.

Except that day last week, his skill was on coffee break, or something.

He decided to back into a spot at the squadron. He was checking his mirrors, looking over his shoulder, slowly backing up, and SMASH! The back window shattered.

Not a crack, not a spiderweb, I'm talking glass all over the freaking place. And though I wasn't there, I know what his face looked like, and I know what he said. Unrepeatable in polite company.

So, he drove his newly-ghettoed car over to Sagami Bill's. Sagami refers to the area close to Sagami Bay in the western part of Kanagawa. We live in the Sagami area.The closest train station to the base is Sagamino, the stop next to that is Sagami-Otsuka. You get the idea. The "Bill" part of Sagami Bill's is no mystery. No, his name is not Bill, but he is the Japanese version of "Bill the mechanic." He's kind of grimy, wears his overalls unbuttoned to the waist revealing an unwashed t-shirt, a cigarette hangs from his lips at all times. He has both a cat and a dog tied to posts in his seen-better-days garage, and both are vocal about their distress. His wife has a nice smile, but is obviously very harried. You can tell from her wonky hair style. His two little girls wash cars. Everyone on base goes to Sagami Bill's. He does good work, at good prices. And he (or his family) meticulously vacuumed the back of our car to rid it of the tiny glass pieces.

It was done in three days, and the garage was only about 15 minutes away. Oh, did I mention that the cost to fix the window was just over a quarter of what we'd paid for the entire car? Cars here are routinely $2,000 and under because these cars are pretty much disposable. They all have dings and scrapes from being driven in the ridiculously narrow two-way roads. So much for our good deal.


Anyway, now I figure when I ding up the car (which will happen) it's okay because Blake made the first move.