There’s a Hole! There’s a Hole! There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Seat!

By Jody Worsham

All rights reserved for midget with small hands

There was a time when all things laid on a car seat stayed there, sometimes for months. Sun glasses tossed on the seat would remain until well one of my sudden stops. An open bag of M&M's would stay put until the last one was eaten. Of course all of this is BS, Before Seat-belts.

With the passage of the seat-belt laws, all cars developed seat belt holes in otherwise perfectly good bench seats. The seat-belt slots housing the retractable seat-belt became the Black Holes of Inner Space. Eye glasses placed on the seat would disappear down the hole at the slightest turn. M&M's would pour themselves into the never ending abyss. Cell phones would slide ringing into the blackness.

Small children are now bribed by parents to "Stick your hand down in the hole and see what you can find." Or "Ok, honey, help Mommy find her glasses. I think it went down the hole. Now don't worry if you feel something gooey, that's probably the chocolate bar I lost when I turned the corner yesterday and not zombie brains."

Others have used the black hole searches to occupy starving children. "We want a snack." "Ok, you can have all the M&M's you can find in the seat-belt holes." Others threaten to use the black holes to threaten misbehaving children. "If you don't behave, you're going to have to search for my car keys in 'theeeee blaaaaack hoooole' and it won't be pretty."

Like space black holes, you know the seat-belt hole is there; you just can't see what's in it. You know your cell phone is in the hole, you can hear it ringing from afar as friends frantically dial your number so you can track it down before your battery dies. You can look under the seat a hundred times, around the seats, even between the seats, but nothing can penetrate the black hole.

Nor can you prove the existence of anything that has entered the black hole. You saw your driver's license slip into the black hole, but you can't prove it to the nice policeman. Unless you have the long slim fingers of a concert pianist, a visiting midget is in the passenger seat or a cooperative two-year old (now that's a contradiction of terms) in the back seat, the chances of retrieving the item are slim. Just go ahead and pay the fine.

Anthropologists predict that in the future the first and second fingers of adults will grow to resemble pincers due to continuous probing of the black seat-belt holes as they search for lost objects. I'm sure space ships will have the required seat belts. That could explain Spock's unique hand greeting.

Now when the children are singing that maddening never ending "There's a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea", I had my own lyrics. "There's a watch on the pen on the earring on the phone on the M&Ms, on the log in the hole in the bottom of the seat. There's a hoooole, there's a hoooole, there's a hole in the bottom of the seat."

Maybe I'll invent the rubber stretch seat-belt slot cozies. Then I could sing "There's a cover for the seat belt in the bottom of the seat. There's no hole, there's no hole, there's no hole in the bottom of the seat." Until then, I've got to find a midget or two-year-old to retrieve my glasses.