My parents have always been against luxury cars because they don't believe in showing their wealth. Hippie outside, Harvard inside. If they drove a nice car, people might point to them and say, "Look, those people have money!" Thus, my parents are champions at disguising wealth. They're penny pinchers and Chevy drivers.

The only time I can remember my parents breaking the Chevy tradition is when my mom got a Cadillac. It wasn't her fault though. When my great aunt died, she left my mother her Cadillac. Suddenly my mother was driving one of the most expensive cars in America. Imagine the embarrassment this caused!

Even my mother, who can usually justify anything, had a hard time admitting to such extravagance. She said she felt self-conscious driving a Cadillac to the supermarket. She was haunted by housewives with their hair in rollers gathered at the check-out counter saying, "Now there goes a woman with some money!" Furthermore, such an expensive car should be kept in the garage, something my mom could never imagine. She hadn't parked a car in the garage for years, and she she sure wasn't going to give up that storage space for some frilly gussed up automobile.

But maybe, just maybe she could still drive it with a clear conscience. After all, she didn't buy it herself; it was a gift. And a used gift at that, so it could hardly be considered an extravagance. And if it's not extravagant then it's not a luxury car since all luxury cars are extravagant, which follows that as long as she didn't think of it as a luxury car, it wasn't.

Add to that the fact that she had been lamenting the demise of the station wagon and its replacement with the now popular van. "Vans drive like trucks," Mom would say and her eyes would get dewy as she remembered the days of stuffing bales of straw and horse feed into her Chevy Impala station wagon.

So Mom had finally come up with the answer to this dilemna: a car that looks like a Cadillac, drives like a Cadillac, but is used like a station wagon. She no longer saw the point of attaching the ski rack to the top of the car or tying the Christmas tree to the roof. She could more easily stuff things right into the Cadillac and still have extra space for the two Labrador Retrievers.

As if two drooling dogs in the back seat isn't enough to convince someone that a Cadillac is not a luxury car, Mom went one step further. Whenever she had to leave valuables in the car, she disguised them by putting them inside trash bags.

Even when the Cadillac was twelve years old and Mom was spending thousands of dollars a year on various inane repairs. But by now, she couldn't bear to drive anything less either. Mom's image had changed from that of a rich person with a five-year-old Cadillac to a rich person "wanna-be" with a twelve-year-old Cadillac with rusting side panels and one car door replaced with one of a different color. Finally, when we children suggested she tint the windows, she traded it in--for a ten-year-old Cadillac! Since it was an old car, she could accept the leather seats and spoked wheels in this upgraded model.

So now my parents have a ten-year-old Cadillac, a five-year-old Chevy and a ten-year-old Chevy. That's right-three cars for two people. Rather than having two new cars that won't break down, they have three used cars, old enough to regularly break down. Mom claims she needs an extra car to drive when one of the others is in the shop.

"I just don't understand how anybody can live without three cars," she says.

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