My husband Pat has twice now gone out to buy a work truck and come home with a Cadillac. The first time it happened he left in the evening to go to a car auction. He came home in the middle of night and woke me up.

“Hmm”, I asked sleepily, “Did you get a truck?”
“No. I got a Cadillac.”
“Huh?”

He was really excited about this car and had to show it off right then and there. We went outside and there it stood, light pink, in the driveway, sparkling like a glass of champagne in the moonlight.

He opened the passenger door for me, and we admired the leather seats and the inlaid wood on the dashboard.

“Watch this!” He backed up several yards, then opened and closed the trunk from that distance with a press on the keys. This was many years ago and quite the big deal at the time……..

The next morning we took Champagne for a twirl. One of our daughters was in kindergarten and home sick that day, so we sandwiched her in between us in the front seat. She threw up all over the dashboard about a mile into the trip, and Pat yanked off his shirt to mop it up without missing a revolution of the tires.

That sweet car took us many places and back home over the years. At one point, the ceiling fabric started to come loose, and hang in little billows, like a parachute, especially in the back seat. We tried pinning it up here and there, but it just got so bad that one summer day we decided to rip it all out and replace it.

Pat told me that entire ceiling was a piece of molded plastic that was removable! And he took it out before he went to work the next day and left it on the big cement slab porch in front of our old farmhouse. It was like a giant upside down turtle shell. The more I considered it, the more it started looking like a blank canvas, so ixnayed the idea of gluing fabric on it, and decided to paint it instead! That would be SO much easier.

It was such a big surface that painting it with a brush would have taken all day. Instead I squirted paint out onto a plate, and sponge painted the whole thing. Then dipped a brush into the paint, and flicked paint all over the ceiling shell, in many different colors. It was such a happy sunny day, the music was on, and there was paint all over the ceiling, me and the porch too. It was a wonderful time. And the ceiling was coming along quite nicely, a wild galaxy.

Suddenly it came to me that it would look good with bugs crawling all over it. I had recently carved a bunch of erasers into bugs for rubber stamping. I ran back into the house and brought out  ladybug, cockroach and spider stamps. Instead of inking them in a stamp pad I brushed paint on them, and started stamping. To make them look like they were crawling all over the ceiling. It was quite the image….bugs in outer space. Wow Wee!

After a while our then tween age daughters came outside, looked at the ceiling shell, the paint everywhere, the crawling bugs and put their hands over their mouths.

“MOM! What are you DOING?!?” shouted the oldest.
“Dad is going to KILL YOU!” her sister chimed in.

Suddenly, in an instant, my euphoric little world stopped spinning and there I was, back in (somebody else’s) reality, suddenly very unsure of myself.

“Daddy will love this.” I assured them.

“NO HE WON’T” they cried in unison.

“Yes he will love it.” and then I declared “He will love it because I did it!” and then, grasping at straws “He loves the way I am!” I was becoming more and more shaken. Those two have always had a way of throwing me completely off the planet, because I actually listen to them and care what they think. I felt like I was going to throw up.

Just then Pat pulled down the driveway. I ran out to head him off, to explain what happened, and pave the way for him to see it. But there was no time for a good story. He shot out of the car and right over to the porch where the Debby Downer duo stood with their hands on their hips, waiting for what they thought was going to happen.

Pat took one look at the ceiling, turned to me smiling and laughing and said “Well, you just added a couple of thousand dollars value to the car.” And after the paint dried, he happily popped the ceiling back into place and that was that.

The daughters were mortified by that ceiling, even though EVERYONE, including all their friends, thought it was the coolest thing ever. Too bad we never got a picture of it. I did find a picture of what the car looked like online tho.

About a year later, when the odometer was past 250,000 miles, and the transmission was literally dragging in the street, I noisily landed into a nearby car dealership to get another car, and settled on a nice used Buick, which was not quite as glamorous as the Cadillac, but it did have leather seats.

When it came time to determine the trade in amount of the Cadillac, the salesman said, “I really can’t give you anything for your Cadillac, but I will give you fifteen hundred dollars for that ceiling.”

“Make it two thousand and you have a deal” I answered.

He agreed, and we shook on it. I saw him few days later when I went back to the dealership to pick up the B that was missing off the Buick letters. He told me the Caddy had gone to a junk yard, and the ceiling was nailed to his living room wall.

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