The Pink Honda Civic

There is a community college very close to my house. Each day on my way to office or on my back home from office (that’s four times a day considering I come home for lunch), I have to pass by this college in my car. There is no compound or partition that separates the parking lot from the road and hence there is complete visibility of all cars in the parking lot.

On couple of instances when I was passing through the college, I noticed a pink Honda Civic car entering into the college campus. The striking color boggled me because I had not seen a pink car before in my life. As can be guessed, there were few gals in the car and no doubt the car belonged to one of them. I was intrigued about the obsession of the color pink with gals. In fact, I happened to see this particular car enter the campus a couple of times at the same time I was passing through the college campus.

After this incident, perhaps because it was easy to distinguish it amongst 100 visible cars or perhaps because i wanted to humor myself daily, each time I passed through the college I gave a quick glance over all the cars in the parking lot and searched for that pink Honda civic. Usually I found it within a few seconds. This became a game of sorts. I would only get about 4-5 seconds for scanning through the parking lot, and I would be driving at about 25 mph on a single-lane two-way road. So, with these slight challenges, it was a quirky self-made game with no gain no loss, and yet this tiny desire to win. Something to make life interesting, that wee bit more.

As it happened, it was not this quest for pink Honda Civic that eventually gave me joy. This search for a vehicle-in-the-parking-lot, in fact, brought back memories from a distant past. During my college days, I had a crush on a girl. I was too shy to talk to her anyways but I knew the two-wheeler in which she used to come to college. She wasn’t in my class so the only way I knew if she had come to college or not was to quickly glance through the parking lot once a day to check if her two-wheeler was present. Seeing her vehicle in the parking lot was almost as good as seeing her, some kind of an assurance that the day might turn favorably so for me to get a glimpse of her. It was like a hope, daily. Something that made me look forward to in life. It was a special moment – this searching through the parking lot. It was a tense moment too. No vehicle meant she either hadn’t yet come to college or would not come. Which meant there was no hope of seeing her that day. Which meant, it was a boring day!

Now, when I search for this pink car, I am remembered of all this teenage emotions and how strange it all felt then. I don’t get all that excited now when my eyes finally latch on to the car in the parking lot but I surely feel nice remembering those good old days back in college when my eyes latched on to that two-wheeler!