Zippy's Trunk: An Inventory

I may or may not have mentioned before that, in 2007, I had to emergency-purchase a car because my existing car, a Dodge Stratus, um, caught fire.

I replaced that dodgy Dodge with Zippy, a little one-year-old Hyundai Elantra who, despite having spent his existence to that point as a rental car in Central Florida, went on to live to the ripe old age of 15, including moving a thousand miles north with me after my tenure at Disney ended, and never had a single major (expensive) problem.

But at 15, how much longer Zippy’s luck would hold out was an open question. When you rode in him, certain noises and sensations began to hint that he was on the verge of severe multiple car organ failure. Even if you chose to blithely ignore that, as I did, he was showing his age in other ways. The inside door handle on the driver’s side cracked off a couple years ago. There was a dangly nubbin sticking out of the door that, when pulled, still functioned as a door handle and opened the door; however, my brother-in-law, a car aficionado, got a pained expression on his face whenever he was reminded about that. In addition, the left front speaker tended to go on strike in cold weather. Also, Zippy came with exactly one key and one remote clicker. The remote lasted about seven or eight years, at which point it started to come apart and had to be held together with a rubber band. The clicker was necessary, though, because unlocking Zippy with a key would cause him to scream as if he was being robbed. One time, after taking him in for maintenance, that stopped happening. I suspect the mechanics disconnected Zippy’s alarm, which was honestly a blessing, because Zippy’s remote exploded in a shower of plastic upon impact with the ground shortly after.

It’s probably also important to note that Zippy was trapped in 2006, a time before smart phones, streaming music, and onboard HAL-9000s that show you what you’re about to back up into, parallel-park for you, and automatically slam your brakes if you’re about to hit something.

Anyway, the point is that various people I love began to convince me that maybe it was time for a car that didn’t function like the Millennium Falcon after a run-in with an Imperial Star Destroyer. When they asked me what kind of car I’d like to replace it with, I told them that it had to drive, and also a working door handle would be nice. My standards were not high.

So I traded Zippy in for a 2022 (my new car is from the future!) Hyundai Tucson that has those things, PLUS an onboard HAL-9000.

However…this meant I had to remove 15 years’ worth of stuff from Zippy’s trunk, back seat, center console, and glove compartment.

Yes: because I barely qualify as a functioning adult, although I may have brought in a few armloads of stuff from time to time, I’m fairly certainly I never gave Zippy a good cleaning out the entire time I owned him. As a result, Zippy was like my own personal weird little time capsule, so I thought I’d catalog some of the stuff I found.

Let’s get the big stuff out of the way first…

Yes, I (Eventually) Got That Thing You Sent Me

The bulk of what was in Zippy’s trunk was unopened mail from at least seven years ago.

…Let me explain. Before I bought my house, the apartments I lived in had inconvenient mailboxes. Checking the mail either involved a flight of stairs or walking several blocks across the complex. That was WAY too much energy to expend for junk mail and bills, so I usually only checked my mail when I was on my way out to go somewhere. I would toss the mail in the back seat, intending to bring it in later, and then later, I would inevitably forget it was there.

Then a time would come when I would be required to use my back seat for the transportation of people, instead of unopened mail. Since I was more than likely already running late when I realized this, I didn’t usually have time to haul a stack of mail from the apartment complex parking lot back up to my apartment, so I would hastily shove it in the trunk so there was room for a butt or two.

This cycle repeated until I bought a house, and my mailbox was two steps outside my front door.

And while MOST of what was in there was, in fact, junk mail, sale papers, and bills, there was some other kind of important stuff, like a wedding invitation from 2013, a whole lot of Christmas cards, and this absolutely perfect 30th birthday card from [mumble] years ago:

Allow me a super-sappy moment: one of the Christmas cards was from my grandmother, who passed away in 2019. It still had $10 in it.

SO MUCH Sheet Music, You Guys

For seven of the years that I owned Zippy, I was a paid vocalist at a church.

We had hymnals. We didn’t use ’em. The more elderly veteran choir members had trouble holding them up for extended lengths of time (those things were heavier than a complete hardcover set of Lord of the Rings) and one or two of them never managed to find the right page until the song was over. So, the director just photocopied EVERYTHING for us, to keep in presumably-lighter three ring binders in order of performance.

Here’s a thing I have learned about myself over the years: since I am habitually running late, if I’m expected to remember to bring something with me on a regular basis, I will forget it frequently as I’m running out the door. My solution to this was to leave these things in the car, so that I would have them anyway. This worked with my Disney nametag, my Dungeons & Dragons player’s handbook, and with my binder of church music–because, if I brought that thing in the house to organize it, it would not make it out the door with me on Sunday morning.

The result of this was that things were seldom removed from the binder. It would just keep getting heavier and heavier until, in a fit of frustration, I would grab a chunk of music out of the back section (presumably, stuff I hadn’t needed in a while) and leave it in the car.

Zippy’s back seat, therefore, became my ad hoc music library, and it was organized according to the surprisingly effective method my cousin Karl refers to as the ‘sedimentary filing system’. Here’s how the system worked: Sunday mornings, I’d pull up to the church parking lot and look over the list of music we were supposed to be singing that day. “When was the last time we sang this particular psalm?” I’d ask myself. “Maybe around Christmas?” Then I’d turn to the stack of sheet music in the back seat, find the depth in the stack that was most likely deposited there around Christmas, and start rifling through that section of mess for the music in question.

I am counting on all of you to never inform my former music director that I operated according to this method…although I imagine he suspected as much anyway.

Self Help Stuff

 

In between Disney and where I work now, I worked for a travel agency that mostly sold trips to Disney. I often refer to it as ‘The Travel Agency That Must Not Be Named,’ because working there was awful, but they gave me a bunch of free self help books, and they paid for me to take the Dale Carnegie course. Apparently, I was pretty good at the Dale Carnegie stuff, because they invited me to come back and be their equivalent of a teaching assistant a couple times.

These things have been in Zippy’s trunk for between six and eight years. Obviously, they’ve been very helpful.

Script/Libretto From a Show I Was In Seven Years Ago

 

It got stepped on at some point.

Attendant Bag

 

 

These were probably in there because the attendant/trainer/captain dress code required black shoes, and I needed to have them with me in case there was a last-minute schedule change. Clearly, they also never made it out of the trunk after my time at Disney ended. They saved my butt one Sunday when I was particularly sleep-deprived and showed up to sing at church in rainbow Skechers.

Probably recent…it’s not like I needed these in Florida.

Zippy kept eating them.

Socks.

We don’t know where it’s been (or how long it was there).

 

I have now lived in my current county for longer than I lived in Osceola County, Florida, and I have never been called for jury duty. In Osceola County, not only was I called twice, I was put IN the juries both times. The second time, I did everything in my power not to call attention to myself so that they wouldn’t pick me, and I got picked anyway. The other jurors told me later that it was probably for two reasons: the all-black sneakers I was wearing, which were a dead giveaway that I was a Disney employee (see above) and my honest face.

At any rate, based on the above data and my notorious math skills, I can conclude that Osceola County has infinity percent more crime than my current neighborhood.

Thank You Card

 

From my little sister, thanking me for flying in from Florida to attend her high school graduation ceremony.

She has a doctorate now.

Two-Page Flip Book

Okay, so, this is kind of cool. I used to teach youth education programs at Disney (on top of everything else I did there) and one of them was about film animation. One of the activities the kids got to do in this program was an extremely abbreviated version of a flip book–the page was folded in half, and you drew two slightly different drawings on it. As you closed and opened the top page, it looked like your drawing was moving. This was one of the pre-made examples I used (with subject matter dear to my heart, obviously). Finding it made me smile.

This Present Is Safe

At some point, someone brought a Christmas present down to Florida for me and carried it on the plane, apparently.

Barbershop Things

 

For a brief but glorious moment, I was in a barbershop quartet with three other wonderful ladies.

Ninja Turtle Sunglasses

I had a bad habit of losing sunglasses. I put these in Zippy’s center console and, somehow, never lost them.

…And I definitely wore them into stores more than once.

CDs

Remember 2007, when these weren’t obsolete yet?

Various and Sundry Disney Things

Clockwise from top left: Disneyland Family Reunion button from 2009 (honestly not sure how that got there–I’ve never driven Zippy to California); Food and Wine Festival charge card; wristwatch that says “Operations, Learning & Development” on it, which Disney gave us as a free gift during Trainer Appreciation Week, a holiday I’m fairly certain they made up; A baggie full of Mickey Mouse-shaped pin backs; and, uh, Happy 36th Birthday, Walt Disney World.

Cards That Could Once Have Gotten Me Books, But No Longer Can

It has been–I cannot stress this enough–nine years since I left my job at Disney and moved out of Osceola County. A thousand miles out. It’s kind of genuinely worrying how MUCH Florida stuff was still in my car after all that time. This is why I can’t be left unsupervised, folks.

RIP, Borders.

Party Favor from a Bachelorette Party

 

Pixellated, because I’m told kids read this blog sometimes.

*****

Contest for the Oldest Thing in Zippy’s Trunk (and Various Compartments)

As I was sifting through all the piles of stuff and realized that a lot of it was really, really old, I began to wonder if I could figure out what had been in there the longest. Obviously, the park maps dated 2012 were the starting benchmark.

At first, I came across a couple utility bills from ten or eleven years and a thousand miles ago. They took an early lead.

…I’m pretty sure I paid them.

After that, I came across some Disney resort room keys from 2009.

After some math, I determined that my little sister’s high school graduation was in 2008–so the graduation thank you card was the new item to beat.

However–Walt Disney World’s 36th Birthday? I would have been given that button on my way into work on October 1, 2007. (Apparently, my shift was at Epcot that day.)

I recently got pulled over because Zippy had a broken headlight, and the police officer asked me for current proof of insurance. I couldn’t find it–but that was how I knew that I could beat October of 2007. Because in the process of looking through my glove compartment, not only did I find every single one of Zippy’s annual license plate registrations, I found some insurance cards from within my first year of purchasing Zippy.

But I could do better than May of 2007. In the pocket of my attendant bag was a Great Service Fanatic card–a recognition that Disney cast members could give to other cast members for going above and beyond at their jobs. I certainly can’t remember what I got this one for, but apparently I had a very good day at work on April 26, 2007.

Finally, one of the last things I came across, at the very bottom of Zippy’s glove compartment’s sedimentary filing system: A record of the maintenance that was done to Zippy after he was done being a rental car and before they put him up for sale, in January 2007, before I even bought the car.

*****

So, there you have it, folks. Zippy is proof that I haven’t always been this much of a hot mess–I used to be much, much worse.

Zippy’s replacement, my future-car with onboard HAL-9000, has been named Lando Car-rissian. I am determined that Lando will never, ever get this bad.