Driving a Hummer

If you could indulge me, I will not be traveling back to my journey of grief just yet. Maybe when all is said and done some things just don't need to be re-lived and re-felt. This does not mean I will never, I just don't feel like it now....

When Scott came back from his trip to help take care of his Dad our little Toyota Echo had a transformation. When I looked outside the window instead of a little bitty car was this HUGE H3 sitting in our driveway. For those of you who are car-illiterate (like me) it is the third in the Hummer line , the smallest version of the vehicles most derided for eating too much fuel, taking up too much room and single handily destroying the planet. It is the most ostentatious car out there in all its brash "I am American and can drive whatever I like" kind of way. It is so cool!
Scott is not working this week and maybe next...so instead of driving my car, I drove the beast. Next to our little Echo...OK, it is a tank. It is so cool!
This made me think about assumption we make about people...people we do not know except for the cars they drive, houses they live in and clothes they wear. Sometimes though all we have to work with is the cars they drive. What would you assume if you saw me drive this car down the road and knew nothing else about me?
I know what I would think...but how far from the truth could we be? This car belongs to my father-in-law who is a 79 years old Marine. Not too long ago as he battles cancer he thought to himself...I want to drive a hummer. If this is the last car I own...why not! He is recuperating from surgery where half his face was taken off to get at a fast growing tumor. He won't be driving for awhile so we are borrowing it for a week or so.
What driving a hummer has taught me this past week...we make unfair assumptions all the time about people, snarky remarks about what people own, drive and wear. I wonder why we do unless we assume to be better than.
Maybe we should let it go and let people be...I know I need too.
Driving a hummer..humbled me.