Sunday Column Follow-up

Maybe you read my Sunday column, describing my car's efforts to stimulate the economy, save the planet, make me less distracted through radio silence  and shrink my waistline.

I have a follow up report.

On Sunday, I embarked on a mission to clean out my car for the first time in months. My main objective was to beat the odds and find a small card bearing a secret code that would allow me to make my radio operational.

My battery went stone dead during the big cold snap a few weeks back, triggering an anti-theft device that renders the radio useless until the code is entered. Handy. Maddening.

So I searched the glove box for several minutes, pulling out old reporter's notebooks, a roughly 100-year-old map of Missouri, dried-out pens and dead batteries. I paused to marvel at some sort of neon-green gook covering the far back corner, and now all over my fingers.

Then, a miracle occurred. In a stack of 1986 baseball cards (no, I have no idea why they're in there) between a neon-stained Cal Ripken and a player to be remembered later, I found the code card.

Moments later, the radio returned. I yelled to my wife, who nodded in acknowledgement with no enthusiasm whatsoever for my triumph.

That wasn't all I found. In the backseat, there were several perfectly preserved McNuggets and a petrified donut, all left by my children. There were Happy Meal toys that, I guess, brought little lasting happiness.

I found giant binders full of journalism stuff, like ways to be a better writer, storyteller etc. Too bad they they didn't teach us clairvoyance, or I might have sold my Lee stock before it hit 27 cents.

There were media credentials from various presidential candidate events and discarded press releases and gobs of knotted chords that powered electronic devices long since pitched or lost.

There were travel mugs and more maps. And I found enough pennies, nickles and dimes to buy several shares of Lee stock. Perhaps a controlling interest.

Or maybe a donut, or some McNuggets.