I don’t read the Sault Evening News much any more but tonight somebody posted a photo of a short little traffic accident blurb on Facebook and it had me rolling around on the ground gnoffing. Apparently several people were driving around in an automotive vee-hickle when the airbags spontaneously activated for no apparent reason, i.e., no impact with another vee-hickle or anything else. Police verified that there was no exterior damage to the car. The vee-hickle was loaded on to a tow truck and for reasons I don’t totally understand, it rolled off and crashed into the police car. No one was injured (and I don’t think anyone was charged for anything) and the headline for this little article was “Christine?”.

Boy did that bring back memories because the droven-ins, which is what my parents came to call the newspaper police report, have always been funnier than a crutch in the Evening News, what with people p**ing behind the Alpha Bar and whatnot. Except they never actually said “p**ing” and I can’t remember exactly what euphemism was used. (And I just learned that the word is “euphemism”, not “euphenism”. Jeebus.)

Why did we call the police report the droven-ins? Well… So, one day when the beach urchins were small, we were at the moomincabin and one of the urchins decided to go down to the beach. Except that as soon as she got out the door, she beat a hasty retreat back inside. “Moom! Someone has droven in!” I peered out the window and saw the grandparents’ car in the driveway and Grandroobly getting out of it. I said, “Why don’t you look out and see who it is?” The urchin took a peek and relaxed. “Oh, it’s just a great big mouse.” That “big mouse” being her grandfather.

Everybody had a good laugh about that and it wasn’t too much later that there was a misprint in the Evening News droven-ins where someone had “droven in to a ditch”. Well, maybe it was a misprint or maybe it was my parents mis-reading it. Anyway, the whole droven-in thing took on a hilarious life of its own after that and for a long time we would eagerly check the droven-ins for glimpses of delinquency and mishaps in the small Canadian border city where I was born and raised and know by the back of my hand. Big-city newspapers and even places like the Planet Ann Arbor do not (appropriately) include every single little droven-in.

Memories like these are the ones that make me miss my parents.

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