A few weeks back, I took the kids out to run a few errands—Julie wasn’t feeling well, so they were pretty much all mine that afternoon. The errands themselves were pretty typical: we went to the grocery store to pick up a pizza for dinner that night, and I think I mailed a letter, as well.

Things got a little more interesting, however, when we stopped to get gas. The van was looking pretty grimy—we don’t have a lot of free time on the weekends to begin with, and certain chores have a tendency to fall through the cracks—so I decided run it through the car wash. I’d actually sought out this particular gas station, since a recommendation on the Internet indicated that it was brushless. This turned out to be a complete fabrication, but that’s neither here nor there.

After filling the tank, I pulled up to the car wash entrance. I skimmed the instructions quickly, then hopped out to fold in the van’s mirrors, lest they be ripped from the car and cast into the sea (or so the dramatically worded warning implied). Satisfied that the vehicle was safe from dismemberment, I hopped back in and pulled into the squat structure. As the van settled into place and the interior grew dark, motors began whirring outside, and a bluish mixture of water and soap sprayed over the car’s windows. Julia or Joseph were apprehensive. “What’s that noise?” Joe asked. Then came the brushes.

In all honesty, the brushes really weren’t anything out of the ordinary: just strips of rubber or some unidentifiable material affixed to a rapidly turning spindle. But as far as they kids were concerned, they were the instruments of the devil himself. WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP, went the brushes as they began slapping the hood of the car. WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP, the sound growing louder as they made their way along the sides and over the top, moving closer to the kids’ seats in the van’s middle row. Right about then, the screaming started.

Julia kicked things off. She let out a terrified wail that dissolved into fearful cries and helpless sobs. “Make it stop, Daddy! I want to get out!”

Joe, naturally, was not OK with this. I think he was affected as much by his sister’s reaction as by the action of the car wash itself, but the end result was the same: terrified bawling, interspersed with helpless pleading. “No, Daddy, no car wash,” he said over and over again.

The whole episode lasted maybe a minute and a half—I’m cheap and got the bare-bones express wash, naturally—but it took four times that long to get the kids calmed down and coherent again after we pulled back into the sunlight. From now on, I think I’ll stick to washing the car by hand, schedule constraints be damned.

Update, 9/3/2008: To this day, Joe still says, “No car wash,” about half the time we get into the van.