No Fixed Abode: I'm Going to Give This Away, and You're Going to Help Me

An army, they say, is always best equipped to fight its last battle. Perhaps that explains why I spent approximately three hundred and fifty dollars on February 17, 2014 to buy a Britax Pinnacle 90 car seat. Not that I was dissatisfied with the Safety1st Air seat that had shielded him from a blizzard of flying glass and very possibly prevented him from a fatal head trauma just forty-three days prior. Far from it. But I wanted to put John in the absolute best car seat money could buy from that day forward. After all, I’d spent about two thousand bucks on the LaJoie custom seat in my little Plymouth Neon — shouldn’t I go out of my way to find the car seat that would do the best job of minimizing any future impacts?

As fate would have it, my son and I were involved in just one minor crash in the three and a half years that followed, courtesy of an amiable stoner who bumped his Mazda2 into the back of my Accord at just above walking pace during this past winter. Although the Pinnacle is rated for children up to 4’11”, John already feels cramped in it at four-four, so earlier this year I swapped the big Britax out for the smaller Freeway SGL booster seat.

What to do with the Pinnacle? I could sell it on Craigslist, trade it in at one of the used-kids-stuff places. Or I could try to pass along a little bit of the good karma that has attended me and my boy ever since we bought it. Which is where you, the TTAC reader, come in.

When I was the same age that my son is now, I read The Scarlet Ibis and it stayed with me to this very day. Children are fragile, whether they are sick or healthy. Yes, I realize many of us grew up without ever seeing a child seat. I also vividly remember the day when Brother Bark and I convinced some stupid neighborhood kid to put Black Cat firecrackers in his mouth. Let’s not overly romanticize the past simply because it didn’t kill us.

It’s obvious on the face of it that a lot of American families don’t have the ability to spend two weeks’ worth of minimum wage on a child seat. In my travels around the country I see a lot of children in seats that are old, worn, damaged, or just plain cheap. Sometimes there’s no child seat at all. I can’t fix this problem for everybody, but I can fix it for one family.

What I’d like you to do is to tell me the story of a family who could use this seat, either in the comments below or directly to askjack@calamarco.com. I’ll pick somebody a week from now and ship the seat to them at my expense. At this point somebody is sure to bring up the fact that they are still waiting for their Texas Edition badges so this is a good time to tell that story, which is as simple as this: Somehow I managed to lose the box of badges (or have it stolen out of my car) while I was preparing to ship them, and I haven’t managed to find a supplier for a whole bunch more badges. I’ll get that done at some point in the future.

In the meantime, however, this is your chance to put a deserving child in a safe car seat that, according to Britax guidelines, is still good for five more years. Help me find a kid who really needs the seat. And since some of you misanthropes out there can’t do anything that doesn’t also benefit you directly, I’ll sweeten the pot: The winning story gets a size-XL shirt commemorating our absolutely disastrous participation in the Lemons Gator-O-Rama 2013.

So what are you waiting for?