Last Sunday found me backing my car in and out of my driveway at dusk. I doubt any of the neighbors noticed, but if they did, they probably didn’t think much of it, knowing full well that I’m more inclined toward eccentricity than to reason. But there was a truly good reason for what I was doing, backing in and out like that. See, I’d installed a new motion sensor light earlier that dreary afternoon and I was testing it with the car. My feeling was, it would not be unreasonable to expect a motion sensor light to trip if we happen to pull into our driveway at night. So I was trying to trip it by backing the car in and out. And it wasn’t working.

Later that evening, fretting over the potential trouble of trying to return what I assumed was a defective motion-activated light, I decided to read the instructions (gasp!). It said, and I quote, “The sensor in this unit responds to heat emissions from humans, large animals and automobile engines” (the italics are mine). Furthermore, the instructions instructed me to wait approximately 48 hours for the unit to acclimate itself to its environment before reaching its optimum performance level.

The next night, Monday, I volunteered to return our two weekend movies, In The Bedroom (what a fantastic movie) and Nautical Nonsense, another 5-episode Spongebob special featuring “Ripped Pants” and “Something Smells,” also fantastic. The video store is far enough away that I figured the engine would get hot enough to trip the sensor upon my return. It did not. I sat in the dark in my driveway and contemplated the possible reasons for this. Naturally, I couldn’t get out of the car to adjust the sensor because I might trip it, thus delaying my experiment for approximately 12 minutes until the lights shut off again. So I backed the car out and pulled in, making sure to squeeze up a little closer to the Beetle this time in case the sensor was off-center. Nothing. So I backed the car out, turned around and backed in. Still nothing. I pulled out, turned around, pulled in, a little closer, a little closer, a little … okay, too close, but that won’t be noticeable. Still dark. At a loss, I leaned over the steering wheel and began to flail my arms against the windshield. Trip, dammit, I kept thinking to myself. Growing more and more frustrated, I started yelling, as if my words, trapped behind the thick pane of the automobile’s windshield, would scare it on. I yelled, “Wake up!” And you know what? It came on. And my breath caught in my chest for a second, and I blinded myself, staring like an idiot into the two bright floodlights shining down on me. It came on. How the hell…?

There was a knock on my door, and it startled me. My neighbor, apparently bringing out some trash, had witnessed my in-out routine and the subsequent flailing and yelling. He thought I might be hurt and came over to check. Of course, it was he who tripped the sensor, not my yelling. I explained to him what I was doing, which sounded quite ridiculous when uttered aloud, far more ridiculous, in fact, than it seemed while I was doing it. My neighbor laughed once, that kind of laugh that says, “Oh shit, you really are crazy, aren’t you?” before heading back into his house. On my way back into mine, I felt the hood of the car. Absolutely cold. I guess these new cars are just too efficient to trip my little twenty-dollar lamp. I made a point to forget about it and accept the possibility that we might just have to get out of the car before the lights come on.

Still, the fact that I hadn’t waited the full 48 hours before making this critical evaluation might have something to do with it, but you won’t catch me out there testing it again anytime soon.