The Pickwickian vehicle has been making strange noises of late. Let us qualify that statement:  stranger than usual, and not meant in a figurative sense as an attempt to convey the sound of at least four different songs in six keys. It is indeed the actual car making the noises, not the children. Mrs Pickwick is not a fan of strange noises. She may or may not have once, early in her babysitting career, evacuated the premises and called the fire department when she accidentally turned on the fan to the microwave. In any case, cars are larger and more terrifying than even the most industrial of microwaves and their strange noises are correspondingly larger and even more terrifying. However Fr Pickwick had assured her that he heard the noise, knew what the noise was, and also knew that it was quite safe to drive it to the grocery store. The name of the noise-making problem escaped Mrs P immediately after she heard it and went to join the explanations about how pistons work and the location of one’s soft palate.

Upon backing out of the driveway, the car made the strange noise. Loudly. Mrs Pickwick bravely called up all her courage and continued backing, trusting in Fr P’s inner automobile mechanic. It was such a loud and dreadful noise!! She could not leave the driveway. In a panic, she called Fr Pickwick at work and begged him to explain about how the noise was not as imminently threatening as it sounded. Again, he assured her that the noise was merely the mgieinfeihtnieri rubbing against the routneoindht. Mrs Pickwick drove another ten feet and stopped. This was positively intolerable. It sounded precisely as if something had fallen off the car and was dragging along behind. She got out of the car to assess the situation herself. She was a little unsure about exactly what to assess. She had diagnosed a few car problems in the past but they were of a rather limited variety, such as: indeed, yes, I must have just hit that red pole because there is a large red mark on my blue car now  or hmm, the whole car is missing so Fr P must have taken it to work today, or even my goodness I do believe that very large metal piece that looks like the logo of the muffler shop should not be on the ground under the car. Mrs P is gifted with an active imagination, however, and could picture several other possible issues she could identify easily by walking around the car. Alas, all the wheels appeared to be firmly attached and a tree had not fallen on the roof so both her imagination and prism of experience were quickly exhausted.

Then she reached the back of the car. Ever willing to expand her horizons, she added a new car diagnosis to her list of possibilities, and even went so far as to fix it herself, channeling her own hitherto unknown inner automobile mechanic.

Once Busy P’s tricycle was pried out from beneath the fender (is that the correct word for the place a tricycle would be stuck if one were to say, back over it and then drive 50 feet or so? If so, just add learned new vocabulary and incorporated it into conversation to Mrs P’s morning) and safely stowed in the garage, Mrs Pickwick set off to buy the groceries, singing loudly, and possibly off-key, over the strange noise that was not at all as horrible as dragging a small tricycle down the driveway by one’s undercarriage.