It's Saturday night, Valentine's Day. It's lightly snowing outside. I'm in my Neon, in the parking lot behind Cascata Caffe. This being perhaps the busiest night of the year for restaurants, the lot is packed, so I'm parked way back in a dark corner near the trash dumpsters. The Chicken Parmigiana is on the floor of the front seat, getting cold. It's about 8:30pm, and I've been trying for nearly an hour to get the car to start.

The remote starter is a tricky thing. It's a great convenience when I need to give the engine a little lead time to warm up before I get to the car, and also when I want to pop into a store for just a brief moment without cranking the starter an extra time, and without leaving keys in the car. But every once in a while, it adds an element of mystery where I really don't need any. Case in point, why won't the car start? Not with the key, not with the remote, not with various incantations that might activate or deactivate the remote, etc.

Kathy had gone off in a different direction to pick up dessert while I was out picking up dinner, so I call her, and she arrives, bringing the instruction manual for the remote starter. I try everything I can think of, but still no luck. No start.

I don't think it's the battery, but I've got jumper cables, so I try jump-starting from Kathy's car. Still no luck.

Just as I'm about to call a tow truck (which could entail sitting out here for another hour or two), Kathy prevails upon me to leave the car parked here overnight and sort it out in the morning. One problem: the car is not in a real parking spot, and it's blocking the trash. As we have already established that the car is not starting, this means we're talking about pushing the car. And I know that my 5-months-pregnant wife isn't going to be out pushing a car, but the alternative still leaves her at the steering wheel, which has no power steering when the engine is off. And I mentioned that it's starting to snow, right?

Commence 10 minutes or so of this sequence: set the emergency brake, set the steering wheel to the right direction, go around to the end of the car, have Kathy release the brake, push for a few steps, tell Kathy when to yank the emergency brake again, go turn the steering wheel again...

Fortunately, the car is on relatively level ground, so the pushing isn't too bad in either direction. Eventually, we get into the proper parking spot that has opened up right next to where I started.

So we're done for the night. It's looking bleak for the morning, but we've got to get past that. Kathy puts the car in park. She pulls at the ignition key, but it doesn't come out right away. "Oh well, it can't do any harm to give it one last try," she mumbles, as she gives the key a twist.

Crank. Vroom.

"Sonofa...", I mutter.

That was it. Car's fine after that.

I have a theory about how this happened. I think the gear shift (which has been a bit dodgy before) was just on the edge of park, and when the car thinks it's out of park, the starter won't crank at all. Not with the key, not with the remote, etc. But there's no visual display to explain that. I think the pushing of the car was only important in that it gave us a reason to shift out of park and then back into park, so this time the car really knew it was in park.

Or, to put it another way... I tried everything I could think of for over an hour, and the car wouldn't start; Kathy gave it one twist and it worked. I always knew she was made of magic.

Happy Valentine's Day.