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A car this fancy should have a built-in stupidity alert

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Ah, the sound of scrunching sheet metal in the springtime.

It’s that magical moment, behind the wheel, when you feel a certain feeling you don’t typically feel behind the wheel, a feeling you’ve never felt before, or at least not in a long time.

A sort of a bump? Or a shudder? An awkward vibration, perhaps? A peculiar movement, anyway, that no automobile is designed to make — No, this is special.

This is impact.

It’s your car coming into contact with something it was never designed to come into contact with.

But it’s the sound, more than the movement, that makes your heart go pit-a-pat.

For me, it was a low, slow groan, an almost-soft, almost-gentle grinding sound, from just above my Hyundai’s right rear tire.

It only lasted a second or two, but that was long enough to guarantee another semester of college for the body shop guy’s kid.

Even worse than the cost, however, is the humiliation.

When you do it to yourself — when you somehow manage to mash your fender in your own garage — this is humbling.

Since that awful moment, I have tried on various excuses in my head:

(A)  I drove a very small car for 20 years, then suddenly I find myself in this hotel room on wheels, and I’m not used to keeping track of all its outer limits — the front bumper, for example, appears to be about a pickleball court away from the driver’s seat.

(B)  My decrepit garage was already too small for my previous teeny car; it’s not reasonable to expect someone to successfully park a sprawling four-door sedan in a space the size of a shower stall. (Plus, I only got the big car a year and a half ago: not enough practice time.)

(C)  I’m a busy person, with myriad important responsibilities — I can’t be expected to patiently pull an entire full-size vehicle into a tricky narrow slot and pay attention to every little detail, like where the edge of the garage door happens to be situated at any given moment.

Bottom line: I blame our long, chilly New England spring. I’ll explain.

As recently as this past week, we’ve continued using our fireplace in the early mornings. This is wrong on various levels. It’s spring. It’s been spring since March 1st, or March 20th at the latest; we were supposed to be finished with firewood weeks ago.

But no. Last week, I was still regularly lugging firewood into the house from the stack in a far corner of our garage. And with every load, I have to squeeze past the side of my car.

On the fateful day in question, in the very act of gliding my car into the garage, I realized I would soon need to bring in another load of wood.

Hey, I could park this boat a smidgen to the right, I mused, and give myself a little wider firewood-lugging path on the left.

This brilliant insight came just a second too early, because the rear end of my slowly moving car was still hanging out on the driveway.

So as I ever-so-subtly turned my steering wheel, I also ever-so-subtly smushed my fender into the edge of the garage door opening.

There’s always that moment of magical thinking, when you urgently want to rewind time, undo the previous 10 seconds, make it all better again. But dang, magical thinking doesn’t work.

It’s one thing to get rear-ended by a texting teenager. Not your fault. You can wear that neck brace with pride.

But this?

Until I can afford to get the repair work done — perhaps at some point after we reverse global warming — I can only hang my head in self-reproach.

If you see me shuffling along Market Street looking morose, be kind to the loser.