He just wanted to take a brief look at the Nissan dealership. We were thinking about cutting our car payments a little. The Nissan Altima my husband had at the time had been paid off. The plan went something like this . . . we would sell, or trade-in, his blue, 2000 Altima for another, less expensive Nissan.

He just wanted to take a brief look at the Nissan dealership. We were thinking about cutting our car payments a little. The Nissan Altima my husband had at the time had been paid off. The plan went something like this . . . we would sell, or trade-in, his blue, 2000 Altima for another, less expensive Nissan. His car only had about 30,000 miles on it, so according to our numbers, we could make a little profit. We would sell it, buy a cheaper car, then use the surplus toward paying off my car. A perfect plan, if we could just find a car to meet his expectations.

A 250-horsepower, 2005 Nissan Altima with a V6 engine later, we are still wondering what happened. Somewhere on the test drive course (which I’m sure was designed by the dealer to thwart us), a bright, 8-year-old boy, type of smile covered my husband’s face. The only other time that I had seen that smile was when he had gone down a magnificent, 3-level water slide in Maui, Hawaii, during a trip he won through his company. When I saw it, I knew that there was no turning back. As he went around curves at 50 mph, as he jammed on the breaks to experience the joy of the anti-locking breaking system (ABS), I knew that our plan to cut down on car payments was just a fleeting dream, which had gotten sucked into obscurity by a sleek, 5-speed, automatic with manual mode, Altima.

We masked our abandonment of plan A with a pseudo, think-it-over period, which lasted as much as three hours. Yes, I too, was convinced that my husband deserved this car. It didn’t help that I had gotten a new car just months before while he stood by with encouragement. I also knew that whatever the plan B was that he came up with while he stayed at the dealership and I ran errands, it would be powerful. However, it wouldn’t take much to convince the diminishing part of me that believed we should hold off until we had some sense knocked into us by an outside party, that this was actually the new car my husband was meant to have.

When we met up again, he had really gone the extra mile with his marketing campaign. He was actually going to quit smoking so he could buy this car! For years, I had urged him to do so, and he had often said that he was just waiting for the right time. There had been earnest attempts, which of course, got sidetracked by the usual suspects – stress and work. But now, we had found the $27,000 solution to his unhealthy habit. It didn’t matter that our car payments were going to go up, because we were going to save $60 a month by not buying cartons. What exquisite math! But, it was worth it. With a little mind power, he could freeze that ear-to-ear grin forever, keeping it safely nurtured in the comfort of his plush, heated seats, which would be perfectly monitored in an automatic temperature controlled (ATC) environment. The amazing thing is that to this day, besides a couple of rough-day-cigarettes, he has not bought a pack. And bringing that smile out of its sweet hum of a slumber? It only takes a perfectly maneuvered, hairpin curve done at 60 mph to bring it back.