Quick Take
A drunk driver destroyed community activist Peggy Flynn’s parked car — and with it, she lost her hard-earned sense of independence, security and accomplishment. Now she’s navigating insurance companies, rental cars, unexpected expenses and the exhausting search for a replacement she – a woman in her 70s living on a fixed income – might never be able to afford. Even the missing hair clips from her wrecked car have become symbols of everything she lost — and the fairness she hopes to reclaim.
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I can’t find my hair clips.
Not the everyday brown ones, nor the sparkly purple one that I wear to special events. Along with my reading glasses, I usually stash my hair clips in different places: by my laptop, on the kitchen counter, on a patio table, or by my bedroom reading lamp and in my car.
My car!
I can’t look there because last month a drunk driver totaled my car. The only car I ever paid cash for after returning in 2017 from serving in the U.S. Peace Corps in Botswana. For reasons I can’t recall, I had two everyday and one sparkly clip in my car that night.
They’re gone now, like the car, smashed, flattened, but likely not stripped for their valuable parts. Bent teeth combs? Twisted brown plastic?
I agree with everyone – the police, friends, family: it was fortunate that neither I, nor my dog, Coco, nor any of my friends were in the car in late August when a drunk driver plowed into it as it stood parked on Fairmount Avenue, while I went to see “Macbeth” at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.
“It’s just a thing, an object,” one friend said in a sincere attempt to console me.
True, but it’s also not just a thing, or rather, it’s a thing that symbolizes way more than transportation. The drunk driver robbed me of more than the car I intended to drive the rest of my driving days.
The driver took away my sense of accomplishment: As a retiree in my 70s, I’ll never have the means to buy another new car, which is frustrating and depressing; and makes me angry and feel like a victim, which I am.
I wonder: Did she ever buy a new car on her own?
I hope the feeling will be temporary, but the driver also robbed me of some confidence, the belief I have the energy to navigate all the needed pieces of this new reality: police reports, county reports, insurance offers that might cover enough for me to buy a little red wagon, but certainly not a car, and the time to spend 40 hours (so far) researching cars.
The driver needs to reimburse me for hours of anxiety and frustration and lost sleep. Time unpacking the differences among Carvana, Carfax, CarMax, car circus … whatever!
A weekly expense that is also adding up for me is dog walkers. I now have to hire them since pets aren’t allowed in a rental car. I can’t afford to hire them every day, as Coco’s used to walking, so, she, too, curled up in her doughnut, is a little down, a bit resigned, more than a bit resentful at this change in her schedule.
I’d like to see the driver reimburse me for the rental car, too.
For the past 10 months, my stock answer to the question “How are you?” has been: “My small world is fine — healthy, happy, engaged in my community, loved and loving, healthy dog recovered from cancer, growing garden.” Although most people understand immediately that I’m making a distinction between “my world” and something beyond, if pressed, I note that I’m OK but recognize that all is not OK in this country and this world.
Thanks to a random drunk driver, my world is now not OK.
The only thing I wish I could change is not going to “Macbeth” that night, or perhaps parking on a different street.
Maybe I should think of myself as Macbeth, fighting off the invaders: insurance companies, rental companies, the drunk driver’s insurance company, the police department, and on and on. I don’t need to become king, just to be listened to and treated fairly.
And to have my hair clips back.
Yes, I can buy new ones, but I really liked my old ones, the tried and true ones, the ones I relied on to keep my hair out of my eyes, just as my tried and true car kept me safe and secure on the road, with a happy dog in the back.
Peggy Flynn is a longtime resident of Santa Cruz and an active community member. She knows she can’t have her car back, but she’d like to see some justice and fairness for the loss she’s suffered.
