About six weeks ago, while I was driving down Washington Street in Wilmington after speaking to a civic association, a charming young lady from Pennsylvania apparently said to herself “hey, it’s been a slow night, I think I’ll run a stop sign without slowing down and see what happens.” Approximately one second later she found her car embedded in the driver’s side door of my beloved Ford Focus station wagon. She totaled my car, but amazingly neither one of us was hurt.

You will be pleased to know that in the finest tradition of our country’s credo that all men are equal under the law, my experience with the other driver’s insurance company was just as miserable as anyone else’s would have been. But after a few weeks of squabbling, they paid me what my car was worth, and today I am going to pick up the replacement: a used Dodge Caliber station wagon. Why the Dodge Caliber? Because after being T-boned by an inattentive driver and walking away from it, I decided that I wanted the safest American car that the Denn household budget could reasonably afford, and apparently you can drive a Dodge Caliber off a cliff without hurting yourself too much. I bid a fond farewell to the Focus at the auto body shop last week, recovering among other things the “Curious George Goes to the Ice Cream Store” book that the Newark Library had been threatening to kneecap me over.

The Caliber’s maiden voyage will be down to Dover to a press conference with Delaware’s volunteer firefighters, where we will unveil a bill designed to keep auto insurance companies from canceling the policies of volunteer firefighters and ambulance crew members simply because they are volunteers who use their cars to get to the station when a call comes in. Not because they hit anyone on the way to the station, mind you, but simply because they are firefighters. Some of you are saying to yourselves “why do you need such a bill, no insurance company would ever do something like that.” Guess again. It happened just a few months ago, and even though I got that situation reversed, the firefighters asked if we could put something in the law to ensure that it didn’t happen again. It is the least we can do for our emergeny responders.