Help, Help Me, Honda

(to the tune of "Help Help Me Rhonda")

One of the fiber arts I've done since I was about 8 is weaving. I have a great Leclerc Artisat floor loom, a nice little jack loom that folds with the weaving on it, so I can warp it up, weave a little, and take it to a demo where people will come up to me and tell their kids, "Look, honey, the lady's knitting."

Well, that's the whole point of a demo, after all, so I can explain to the kids that the lady is weaving, and show them how it's done. (Okay, the real point of a demo for me is that I get to go and weave ALL DAY with no interruptions to make a cheese sandwich, let a dog in or out, answer the phone, or . . . you get the idea.)

But in order to go to the demo, I have to stuff my nice little loom into my nice little minivan, which is a 1996 Honda Odyssey, the Odyssey before they blew it up in size and made the gas mileage go from my 24-30 mpg (which I track all the time in a little notebook) down to about 12, or maybe 6. And the loom doesn't really fit. I have to lay things sideways and take out the back seats. Come on, Honda, make me a vehicle my loom will fit in! Measured the Honda Element (and am I the only one who thinks of that movie with Daryl Hannah: "It's boxy, but it's good" when they see the Element?) and nope, loom won't fit.

My husband and I love our Hondas. We bought our first little red Civic hatchback brand-new out of the showroom in 1989. It had 21 miles on the odometer, and they literally had to open the big glass showroom doors and drive it out. We drove that car everywhere for 10 years. And we put everything in it. We used to joke that the car was our Tardis. (Go Google Dr. Who, and I don't know if I'm spelling Tardis right.

You can stuff a baled Christmas tree into a 1989 Civic. (Fold the back seat flat, lay the front seat down, slide the tree in through the hatch. Tip: tarpaulins are your friend, unless you like being poked in the rear with drying pine needles for the rest of the year.)

You can put a leaking 40-gallon electric water heater in it and drive it to the dump, where the dump guy will say, "Wow, you really do have a water heater in that thing!" You can put your new water heater in it, and the hardware store guy will be likewise stunned.

I don't know why Honda made the succeeding models littler, unless it was so after a while, they could poof the Civic back to its 1989 size and brag about how much room it had inside.

So anyway. I know Honda can do it. Say it with me now: 42" interior height. (That's how high it needs to be so I don't have to put the loom in propped up diagonally.)