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The woman who gave me the little red car was married to my father for almost a year. She drove it up and down the Atlantic coast and truly believed that it was the best car ever. (She scored as much as 45 miles a gallon on a 1995 car. She was right on that part.) She and my dad sent a photo to me a few weeks before I came out to pick it up, and she just brimmed with glee. "Isn't it beautiful?" I'd not driven it, and hadn't been carefully schooled by the street-racing, car-trickin' hoodlums who covet those little hatchbacks so much, but I tried to muster some enthusiasm for it. It just looked like a car to me.
I picked it up not knowing the first thing about how to drive a manual transmission, and on the trip home (across seven states) her 16-year-old son and my college roommate coached me steadily. The boy would shake his head and take over driving for an hour when I got too tired, and LP simply sat in the passenger seat shouting, "Clutch! Clutch!" whenever I approached an exit ramp. By the time I got home I managed to avoid stalling it more than once a day or so. Over the next six years, we grew fonder of each other. I had a 25 mile commute to my job over country roads, and shifting gears out of the backwards little town I worked in became my small joy on the way home. The air conditioner broke down after a year, and so I rolled down the windows and kept a red bandana under the seat to hold my hair back. I listened to the mix tapes C had made me, library booktapes by Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley, and what at the time was the world's best NPR station. When it got too hot, or when I was too exhausted or beaten down by work, I would stop halfway home by a big electrical tower that sat in the middle of a cornfield, and I would take a nap in the little red car.
C moved to Chicago and I learned to get from home to here in a little more than five hours. The car was easy to store, even in Hyde Park. After I moved, I learned not to take it to work because I couldn't find a parking space at the end of the night and because the teen girls I worked with complained that the manual transmission made it too jerky and caused carsickness. The teen boys, however, remarked that it was nice to see someone who knew how to drive around here.
The car only seriously failed me twice; once when the clutch finally died on the way to work, and once on a trip down to C's family (ironically, because his car was deemed too fragile and we were picking up a new one). If I'd done any maintenance besides the 60K timing belt tuneup, I probably wouldn't have had to suffer those problems. I didn't wash the thing as often as I should have, and didn't always keep the right amount of air in the tires. It still got better mileage than any other car in the family. I filled it up once every two weeks or so, even in the middle of the school year when I was running around. It had a ten-gallon tank and rarely cost me even $20.
I got to see the remains of the little red car yesterday. It was sitting in a couple inches of frozen mud at the auto pound next to the Metra tracks. Ten days had passed since the fire, and two pretty major snowstorms, so there was rust covering the frame and a heavy layer of snow inside the floor of the car. There was no roof, no hood, no doors, no side panels, no hatchback. It looked as if there was a second car engine sitting atop the front of the car, or possibly that all the pieces had just been taken out and not put back in cleanly. The front two tires and one side blinker still existed, and I tried to get the cap off one of the tires but it was fused on. (This is good news, as I guess I didn't really want to carry around a moldy old tire cap for the rest of my life.) There were thin metal frames where the seats, the gearshift, and the steering wheel had been. I wish now I could go back and dig through the snow a little to see what the underbelly of the car looked like. But I got enough, I think, to know that it was gone.
So we bought a new car yesterday--2004, gray, and shiny. We're naming it James. As required, it gets really good mileage, it has four doors to make it easier to move the tot in and out of the vehicle, and it should be extremely reliable. It's an automatic, both because we can't get too picky on a pre-owned car and out of deference for those who do not drive a stick shift. I've gotten full access to the garage until I feel calm enough to leave it out on the street overnight, and for a couple years I'll probably be a little freaky about the anti-theft devices, both to save my insurance and my sanity. But it just looks like a car to me right now. I'll let you know how I love it in a few years.
I picked it up not knowing the first thing about how to drive a manual transmission, and on the trip home (across seven states) her 16-year-old son and my college roommate coached me steadily. The boy would shake his head and take over driving for an hour when I got too tired, and LP simply sat in the passenger seat shouting, "Clutch! Clutch!" whenever I approached an exit ramp. By the time I got home I managed to avoid stalling it more than once a day or so. Over the next six years, we grew fonder of each other. I had a 25 mile commute to my job over country roads, and shifting gears out of the backwards little town I worked in became my small joy on the way home. The air conditioner broke down after a year, and so I rolled down the windows and kept a red bandana under the seat to hold my hair back. I listened to the mix tapes C had made me, library booktapes by Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley, and what at the time was the world's best NPR station. When it got too hot, or when I was too exhausted or beaten down by work, I would stop halfway home by a big electrical tower that sat in the middle of a cornfield, and I would take a nap in the little red car.
C moved to Chicago and I learned to get from home to here in a little more than five hours. The car was easy to store, even in Hyde Park. After I moved, I learned not to take it to work because I couldn't find a parking space at the end of the night and because the teen girls I worked with complained that the manual transmission made it too jerky and caused carsickness. The teen boys, however, remarked that it was nice to see someone who knew how to drive around here.
The car only seriously failed me twice; once when the clutch finally died on the way to work, and once on a trip down to C's family (ironically, because his car was deemed too fragile and we were picking up a new one). If I'd done any maintenance besides the 60K timing belt tuneup, I probably wouldn't have had to suffer those problems. I didn't wash the thing as often as I should have, and didn't always keep the right amount of air in the tires. It still got better mileage than any other car in the family. I filled it up once every two weeks or so, even in the middle of the school year when I was running around. It had a ten-gallon tank and rarely cost me even $20.
I got to see the remains of the little red car yesterday. It was sitting in a couple inches of frozen mud at the auto pound next to the Metra tracks. Ten days had passed since the fire, and two pretty major snowstorms, so there was rust covering the frame and a heavy layer of snow inside the floor of the car. There was no roof, no hood, no doors, no side panels, no hatchback. It looked as if there was a second car engine sitting atop the front of the car, or possibly that all the pieces had just been taken out and not put back in cleanly. The front two tires and one side blinker still existed, and I tried to get the cap off one of the tires but it was fused on. (This is good news, as I guess I didn't really want to carry around a moldy old tire cap for the rest of my life.) There were thin metal frames where the seats, the gearshift, and the steering wheel had been. I wish now I could go back and dig through the snow a little to see what the underbelly of the car looked like. But I got enough, I think, to know that it was gone.
So we bought a new car yesterday--2004, gray, and shiny. We're naming it James. As required, it gets really good mileage, it has four doors to make it easier to move the tot in and out of the vehicle, and it should be extremely reliable. It's an automatic, both because we can't get too picky on a pre-owned car and out of deference for those who do not drive a stick shift. I've gotten full access to the garage until I feel calm enough to leave it out on the street overnight, and for a couple years I'll probably be a little freaky about the anti-theft devices, both to save my insurance and my sanity. But it just looks like a car to me right now. I'll let you know how I love it in a few years.
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