Memoir

I love bumper stickers. I think they are fantastic. Nothing better than having to stop for another stupid red light and having something to read on the car in front of you.

I'm not good at describing myself in one quote. In fact, I struggled for weeks to find the perfect quote to put under my high school photo in the yearbook and decided that nothing I picked could describe me just right. So I picked nothing. No quote.

Nearly ten years later, I've thought of a quote, but it took me this long.

My quote, my mantra, was written by Kahlil Gibran and is this:

"And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."

In college, I bought my first car and immediately covered it with bumper stickers. I was sooo happy to be able to make my car stand out in a crowd and to express myself through slogans... that was, until I started working at a place where my coworkers were a bunch of 50-year-old gossipers who would report to each other whenever they saw my car in public.

"Ooooh, Lauren slept in Hilltop dorms last night!" or "Hey, I didn't see your car in the lot, where were you?"

After a while, I wished only to blend in, I grew tired of those same bumper stickers even though I enjoyed looking at the expressions of my tailgaters in the rearview mirror at red lights.

Now, I don't have a single bumper sticker on my car. I still enjoy reading bumper stickers, but they seem to be going out of style. Maybe because nowadays people don't want to be bothered. Plus, they're such a pain to scrape off when it's time to sell the car.

What have your bumper stickers said?