On Sunday morning, we wake up early with the idea of getting all the shopping done before the church crowd jam the roads. This is par for our weekend course; the pious traffic can push Adam to the very edge, a leftover side effect from a decade of Christian school. It begins with dire mumblings about oversized SUVs going ten under the limit and what would Jesus drive, and ends five minutes later with the big forehead vein bluging in an alarming manner and GAH! When it became apparent he would someday pop in a fury of New Testiment verses and gunk, we started getting up earlier.

It's just better that way.

This Sunday, we take the Civic. Just a standard Sunday morning run to Target and Raley's. We run through the list: trash bags, pastrami, chicken for fajitas, fish-comma-nice, and more half-and-half than I know what to do with. Groceries for the week and the normal "crap, put that on the Target list," just another day in suburbia.

Except, hello, what's this? The Civic is refusing to start. Push the key to the third setting, it starts, let go and it dies. Repeatedly.

This is not good. Heck, we've got perishible items in the hot trunk, and it's the middle of the hottest stretch in our chunk of the desert. This? Is bad.

But I'm not worried. This particular problem happened to me the week before and after waiting twenty minutes, I got the car started and drove home. But Adam -- away from his tools, his Hanes manuals and the intarweb -- Adam's a little unnerved. When it doesn't start repeatedly, he asks the one question I know he hates asking.

"What do we do? We've got to get the groceries home."

I hand him my cell phone. "Call the calvary."

Fifteen minutes later, his parents roll up, all smiles and hugs, ready to take us home. On the way home, Adam's dad offers to grab a strap and tow the ailing Honda back to the house, but Adam stands firm. He's going to fix this.

For the next two hours, he hunches over his laptop, doing research. I stay out of his hair, cleaning the house, giving him a plate of bagel and lox, and keeping him in the iced coffee, but he's a man on a mission and he's GOING. TO. FIX. THIS.

A bit before 1 p.m. he comes bounding downstairs and announces we're going. "If it doesn't start, I think I can hot wire it. But if it does start, it can cut out on the road, and then I'll have to hot wire it on the side of the road. And that would suck. So I think I'm just going to hot wire it."

So we go back to Raley's, and Adam gets down to work.

And here's where we get to the commentary on the Albuquerque mindset. For ten minutes, he sits in the driver's seat with a cracked steering column, stripping wires and holding them up to get a better look at them. It's flashing-neon-sign obvious he's starting a car minus a key, but does anyone blink?

Oh, c'mon. Not one person takes a second glance. Have we learned nothing form the previous Civic experience?

Hee!

The car fires right up and we got it home without incident and now a new part is on order.
And let me tell you, if we weren't getting 40+ miles per gallon in the city, the Civic would be out on its little Civic ear. But gas mileage trumps reliability for now, and the Miatas both are seeing lots of drive time, so everyone wins.

Especially Adam. If his Parent Corporation decides to make cutbacks, he can begin an exciting new career in dealing in hot, Reagan-era Hondas, and isn't that filled with Champagne wishes and caviar dreams?