When we got divorced, I got the truck and Darlene got the Toyota Corolla.
I won’t say who got the best deal. The truck was an F150, nothing fancy, with a few dings. The car was a Corolla XE, which was their top-of-the-line Corolla when someone bought it off the showroom floor in 2001. (We bought it used, in 2012.)
Fact is, though, Darlene hated the Corolla. She claimed the seat were uncomfortable, and that the missing side-view mirrors made parallel parking a challenge.
But she also hated the truck. So what are you going to do?
I found myself think about the Corolla XE because I came across an online news article about a new, contagious subvariant of the COVID virus.
The subvariant — not to be confused with a ‘variant’ — has been labeled (by someone?) as Omicron XE.
“Omicron XE”. If that doesn’t sound like a new model electric vehicle from China, then my name is Santa Claus.
Or better yet, my name is “Santa Claus XE.”
When Darlene and I were checking out used cars in 2012, I was definitely not looking for a high-end vehicle. But Darlene was. In fact, she had bought herself a new outfit for the occasion, including some black, velour high heels, a snappy turquoise jean jacket with imitation pearl buttons, and a black, uncomfortably short, lace-trimmed dress. Red, red lipstick. Liquid lash mascara. She looked like someone shopping for a BMW 5 Series.
I probably looked like her chauffeur, with my uniform still at the cleaners.
As I recall, the salesman at the used car lot was hitting on her. He was seriously wearing a blue-and-green-plaid blazer, over a hot-pink shirt. Greasy hair. Pencil-thin mustache.
He kept directing our attention to a maroon-colored Buick that was totally out of our price range. When we finally made it clear that we weren’t interested… well, actually, Darlene really liked the Buick, but I had the checkbook in my own pocket, so that wasn’t going to happen. I think she really liked the salesman, too.
So finally, he steered us over to the Corolla. I can clearly remember his pitch, directed at Darlene.
“You want luxury at a cut-rate price?” he grinned. “Check out this little beauty. A little beauty for a little beauty. This is the XE. Luxury everything in a compact package.”
He pointed to the little metal ‘XE’ next to the rear tail light, and Darlene gave him a smile. “They only made 150,000 of this special model. So let me be perfectly honest. Your friends are going to be green with envy when they see you driving this baby.”
I don’t know if Darlene noticed, but the chrome was starting to peel on the little metal ‘XE’. But the rest of the car looked to be in decent shape.
We took a test drive around the block and found out that the speedometer didn’t work, so when we got back, I started to haggle about the price, but Darlene gave me a dirty look.
“We’ll take it,” she told the salesman.
As I mentioned, she ended up hating the car. I ended up hating the salesman.
But what I really wanted to talk about was the Omicron XE. I seriously doubt that a Omicron XE virus looks very different from, say, Omicron BA.1 or Omicron BA.2. But I understand that the public health experts are desperate to get everyone vaccinated. (Good luck with that one.) They’ve tried the ‘you will probably die without the shot’ approach, the ‘protect your neighbor and her grandmother’ approach, and they tried a lottery, giving people $1 million if their vaccinated name was pulled out of the hat.
So now they are trying the ‘luxury vaccine’ approach.
“Come on down to Executive Medical, your friendly vaccine dispensary. Get protection against the latest model… the Omicron XE… as well as all the other cheaper variants and subvariants that have mostly disappeared off the face of the earth.”
In my imagination, I can see that pencil-thin mustache.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.