Attack of the 10,000-pound baby

You never know how shopping is going to go awry. Sometimes it happens in ways that take days to discover.

Robyn had gone shopping earlier in the week for some essentials goods, and all was fine until we had a conversation Saturday morning before she went to work. I was making a shopping list of my own, and I put down a gallon of milk.

"We went through a gallon of milk since Tuesday?" she inquired.

"No, we never had any milk in the fridge this week." I'm typically the only one that drinks milk. A combination of growing up in Wisconsin and my recently fractured femur has made me overly calcium-aware.

"I definitely remember buying a gallon of milk this week," Robyn stated. "That means," Robyn stares into space as the realization hits her. "That the gallon of milk is still in the trunk!"

Now Robyn had mentioned casually the previous night that on her drive home from work it smelled like an animal had died in her car. We both dismissed it until now, as the mind-boggling, disgusting pieces fell into place.

As Robyn got ready for work, I steeled my resolve and went downstairs to the garage to inspect the trunk.

I opened the trunk to indeed find the MIA gallon of milk, in all of its putrid glory. Now in ancient times, Mongols used to fill leather skins with goat milk, and the churning action of their galloping across the steppe would render the milk into a yogurt-like substance. Now, a Toyota Corolla is no Mongolian mount, and the random rolling of the milk gallon on Robyn's daily commute wasn't bouncy enough to generate anything close to an edible milk by-product.

Instead, the plastic gallon of milk had ballooned outward, and while the top remained intact, it had seeped roughly half of its contents out, into the trunk-liner carpeting, and down into the well that holds the spare tire. I gingerly picked up the jug and brought it over to the grassy area next to the garage. The remaining milk had separated into a think clear liquid, and a slowly moldering solid. As I opened the top to drain off the liquid and throw the rest into the trash, the escaping gases gave off a hiss like a 2-liter bottle of soda.

I went back upstairs to update Robyn on my findings.

"So, how bad is it?" she asked.

"Well, it smells like a 10,000-pound baby spit up in our trunk."

"Sell the car," she said. "Now."

I left the car there and drove Robyn into work. On the way home I stopped and bought a bottle of Odo-Ban, which promised to eliminate odors. After 2 hours of stripping the liners out and scrubbing the trunk with a series of Pine Sol, Odo-Ban and heavy-duty carpet cleaner, I felt confident I had exorcised the funk from the trunk. I was very pleased that the engineers at Toyota had included 2 rubber drain plugs in the bottom of the trunk. The Japanese car makers had obviously anticipated the need for hosing out a trunk out periodically.

Or they had had an encounter with a 10,000-pound baby of their own.