Vehicle mix-ups serve as proof

“I have proof that we are related!” my brother, David, exclaimed. I was immediately apprehensive as he is not the least bit interested in genealogy.
I should tell you that a long time ago, when he was a bratty teenager, I told him he was adopted. I told him that we found him in the cabbage patch and he was so ugly that we felt sorry for him and took him home. I didn’t think he believed me. And, yes, he has said things to me that were just as rude and untrue.
I should also tell you that he was as orange as a pumpkin when he was born. He had six fingers and six toes. I thought he was the most beautiful baby in the world, just like I thought that about my other brother, Michael, when he was born. Plus the extra digits made him better than ordinary infants.
When he was finally released from Barney’s Children’s Hospital, he was a normally colored baby with the usual number of fingers and toes.
Getting back to my story, David told me he had proof that we were related. Then he told me this tale. He had gone out to start his truck and discovered that his tire was flat. He examined it and found a screw lodged in it. He re-inflated the tire with the intention of changing the tire once he got to work. He is a mechanic by trade.
He made it to work safely. When he got a break he went out and jacked up the truck. He spun the tire around but he couldn’t find the screw. His co-workers stood around watching him. David decided to remove the wheel anyway and looked in the bed of the truck for his tools.
He couldn’t figure out who had put a big, silver toolbox in the back of the truck. He was about to ask his co-workers when it slowly dawned on him that the truck he had jacked up was not his.
One of his co-workers had borrowed a friend’s truck for the day and parked it beside David’s. The two vehicles were almost identical. His co-workers had taken bets on how far he would get before he discovered he was dealing with the wrong vehicle.
David thinks this is proof that we are related because I once put a couple of flats of flowers into somebody else’s car. I had looked up to see two women laughing at me because it was their car, not mine.
That isn’t the only time I mistook someone else’s car for my own. Shortly after we got our current car I had gone shopping. I picked up some photographs then went to the big box store in town. I always park in the same row so I can find the car. I came out of the store and clicked the lock. Nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing.
I tried to insert the key into the lock and it wouldn’t go. I peeked inside and couldn’t figure out why someone would steal my pictures off the front seat, then lock the car.
As you may have guessed, it wasn’t my car. It was the same make, model and color. It was even parked crooked and in the correct row. My actual car was two spaces down.
My inability to recognize my own car and David’s inability to recognize his own truck is what makes us related. Or that is what he thinks.
Maybe the idea that we find humor in everyday life and are able to laugh at ourselves tells us that we are not so different. A shared history and a shared mother makes us related. I wouldn’t change that for the world.