I think it’s never too late to apologize to somebody, so here I will issue (again) an apology to my friend who will know who she is when she reads this. I say again because I was called out on my blunder when it first happened. While hunting through the newspaper today I was reminded of that blunder and knew I should bring it up again so I can reapply egg to my face.
Here is what happened. Several of us were meeting outside the old Moorestown Public Library, back in the days when the building was accepted as a cozy but slightly outdated part of the scenery in an exclusive community. The parking lot had poor lighting and the building next door had burned down. It was winter, at night, bleak and cold and dreadful. Still, we decided to carpool it down the road a way to the Starbucks. She offered to drive me over in her vehicle.
It was impressive from where I stood in the parking lot but, not knowing much about any model without something immediately distinctive about it (like a Chrysler PT Cruiser or a Pontiac Aztek), I took my best guess looking at it from the side, and figured it looked like a Jeep Grand Cherokee. I knew Jeep distinguished its higher end models that way, and they were larger than the average back-woods sand dune models. Today those Grand Cherokees run in the $40,000 range, so for me at the time, that was notable. “Nice Jeep,” I said.
Turns out it was a Cadillac Escalade. Those models today, I saw in the paper, cost $80,000. Oops! That’s like calling a yacht a dinghy. No wonder she scrunched her eyebrows as if 500 people had stood together in the parking lot and passed gas.
Anyway, she made it a point to be gracious and show me what such a vehicle is all about. The inside was like the cabin of a luxury yacht. The dashboard was a command center. With one touch, she could properly acclimate the cabin so the drive felt like we were in a cozy living room fireplace on wheels. No car I have ever owned warmed my butt for me. The car had bells and whistles on a high class level. I was happy at the time because I had a CD player in my car (not anything like a Cadillac).
Anyway, so I’m a woman who knows too little about cars to look at one from the side and know what I’m seeing. Sorry.
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