Thread by @AdamHarstad

New post. The story of why car washes make me sad and some math about birthdays.

adamharstad.com/thoughts-for-0…

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I started dating my wife when I was seventeen years old. We ended our second or third date with a moonlit walk along the beach– not so much because I was a romantic as because it was close, it was free, it was private, and I was loathe to let an enjoyable night end.

At some point in the conversation, I picked up a seashell off the beach and grandly declared that I’d keep it forever to remember this night. And then I did, keeping the seashell with me through nine moves in ten years.

I took to keeping it in the coin tray in my car so that I would periodically stumble across it and think back to the early nights of our relationship. The seashell (like the relationship) outlasted two cars with no signs of wear.

Until one day when I took my car in to get it detailed. I drove off only to realize the next day that when cleaning out the trash in the console they had mistakenly thrown away the seashell, too.

And that’s the 100% true story of why to this day car washes make me sad.

(There’s perhaps a parable here about how the physical reminder of an event eventually became more interesting and memorable than the event itself, but I’ll leave that to you to puzzle out. Sometimes a story is just a story.)