When I was a little girl — my mother used to tell me — I would not leave the house unless my socks were folded over exactly in half. She said this with humor, but you could see the exasperation in her eyes, too, as she remembered those days of dressing my sister and me before she took us anywhere. This was the mid-fifties, when you didn't go on airplanes without wearing your Sunday best, and even a trip to the grocery store required lipstick. With two kids under one-and-a-half, I think it probably drove her bananas on a regular basis just to stuff us into clean clothes, much less to have one of us fussing over fashion details like sock height.

This is one of those apocrophal stories that families pass on to explain the character of their members, and though I don't usually fold my socks over these days, I have other, similar demands about beauty and order, and one of them is that I care about the color of my car. I expect I've just incited a collective groan from all the men within earshot, and I don't fault you for it. Caring about the color of one's car is idiotic. But I can't help it. I know the drive-train is important, the state of the tires, the fluid levels. I wasn't born yesterday. It's just that for me, listening to the sound of a purring engine doesn't warm the cockles of my heart the way admiring a nice paint job does, when it's the right color.

I mention this because I'm looking for a new car. A new used car, that is. I've never bought a new car in my life, because at the moment when I drove across that little invisible line between the car lot and the street, that line where the car's value goes down by several thousand dollars in half a second, all of my grandparents would have heart attacks right on the spot. They're already dead, of course, but they'd still have heart attacks. They lived through the Depression, and no argument could make them think it was reasonable to lose that kind of money on purpose.

So I am looking for a used car, and of course, I would like it to be exactly like my current car, which is a maroon Toyota Rav4. As far as I can tell from looking around on the internet, there are eight Rav4's for sale in the United States in my price range. Most of them are in North Carolina, which is not where I live. None of them are maroon.

I can see that my next few weeks are going to be full of compromises. This is what happens in life. Cars, jobs, boyfriends, you name it. You start out looking for a maroon or black or green late-'90s Rav4 with fewer than a hundred thousand miles on it, and you end up buying a white Mazda Protegé with one blue fender, or a late-'80s Jetta that's only been in three collisions. I guess I'd just better prepare myself for it. And who knows? Maybe a miracle will happen and I'll find exactly what I want.

I'm thinking of folding my socks exactly in half before I go out of the house, for luck.