The Cars, Part 2

The station wagon was sold before we left West Virginia and we came back to Connecticut with the Datsun. It was shortly thereafter that I took an adult education course on auto maintenance. From that time on, that poor car was never the same. The points burned out every time it snowed. No mechanic I ever spoke to could explain the connection between the two but it seemed one of those cosmic jokes the universe likes to play on you for no obvious reason. I made another startling winter discovery. The car had a vinyl liner above the passenger compartment. When a sufficient number of very cold days go by and you accidentally hit the liner, it shatters into shreds. This was also the first car in which I ever had a car accident. It was just a torn fender and it was not my fault.

My parents gave us an old Buick which was my wife’s car for a while. It was dark blue and old but it ran. We then traded in the Datsun on a Honda Civic, a significant step up. This was the car that got me through law school. Unfortunately, even as late as the 1980s, Honda’s were subject to rapid salt-induced body rot. We also bought a used VW Beetle to replace the Buick. Interesting thing about those old beetles is that the heater does not actually heat very much. The air-cooled engine did not get all that hot in the winter. As a result, the heater was tepid at best. While we owned that car, Connecticut was hit by a hurricane. Our next-door neighbor’s tree fell over into our driveway. Would you think a branch could have gone through the VW so we could replace it? No. The branches framed it perfectly. We couldn’t go anywhere for a while, but the car survived, literally without a scratch.

Eventually, the VW was retired and we bought a year old Toyota Corolla for my wife. That was a car that just kept on going without giving a bit of trouble. When we traded in the Honda, I made a huge mistake. It was just when I was changing law jobs and in the euphoria of getting out of a bad situation into what I thought was a good one, we decided that my reward would be a Toyota MR2. Yes. I finally had my two-seat sports car! I’ll be the first to admit it was a tremendously fun car to drive. Unfortunately, it’s the car I most closely identify with the “bad year” of depression. As a result of the depression, and the inattention it causes, I backed into a car parked opposite our driveway. That provoked a reaction of me being unworthy to drive it so I insisted that my wife take it and I would drive her car. That lasted for a while until she decided that she was not going to tolerate a clutch and manual transmission and made me take back the MR2. The next year I got hit head on and a huge cup of coffee flew all over the interior. (No, that accident was not my fault, either.) From then on the car smelled faintly of coffee.

The MR2 was passed on to my daughter and I got my first pick-up truck, a Mazda B2200. That was actually fun and the joke was that since I was a NASCAR fan and had a pick-up truck, now I had to get a gun rack for it. I never did and when that truck finally gave up the ghost, we donated it to the Kidney Foundation which towed it away for us. I moved on to a well-used but extremely durable Jeep Cherokee. That was my first 4-wheel drive car and it worked well in the winter.

My wife took over her mother’s Oldsmobile Cutlass which had a couple of neat features. One of the issues she and I have is the heater. I am always too warm and she is always too cold. The Olds had separate controls for individual “comfort zones.” The only issue with that was when I would drive and she was the passenger and we would wind up messing up the settings for the other one. Hey, you make do. That car ran until one day it would not start. We had it towed to a local service station where they were supposed to do a “diagnostic.” After a week of no word, I went over to discover that the engine had been entirely disassembled and they told us we would need a new engine because after pulling it apart they “discovered” that the engine block was cracked. This they could not have figured out simply by LOOKING at the damn engine. They informed us that at that point we owed them over seven hundred dollars and the new engine would run about two thousand dollars more including labor. When my wife got home, we went over to the service station with the title. I signed it, handed it to the owner and said the car was his and he could sell it for parts to cover his costs. He started to threaten me with legal action and I suggested that if he did I would file a complaint with the Motor Vehicle Department (for which I work) about his business practices. End of discussion.

We sold the Jeep to our next door neighbor and it kept running for several more years. We then bought a blue Ford Taurus for me and a Buick Century for my wife from a used car dealer. She had intended the Taurus for herself but Dale Jarrett, my favorite NASCAR driver, at the time drove the #88 Ford Taurus which was blue. End of discussion there. I was actually quite happy with the Taurus. It was a great car and Ford was justifiably proud of it. (Which is why, of course, a few years later they discontinued producing it. Ah, Detroit. Magnificent management decisions….)

We, actually, my wife, decided that we needed another pick-up truck. We bought a 1990 Ford Ranger with over 200,000 miles for eight hundred dollars. Despite having to put another thousand or so into it, this has been one of the best investments we ever made. At least five people have borrowed it for moving or transporting stuff. We have used it repeatedly to haul stuff to the town dump and storage. It’s still with us although it has some “issues” about passing its emissions test.

The Buick died a rather ignominious death. My wife was on her way to work when someone turned quickly into her path while he was making a left turn. I got a call from her from the Hartford Hospital emergency room. My daughter and I both had dental appointments that morning and I immediately called the dentist to tell them I would not be in. My daughter was, literally, in the chair and they told her. Fortunately, the dentist’s office is next to the hospital so she walked over. There we were, one happy family sitting in the ER waiting for someone to look at her. From 9:30 AM until 3:00 PM, we sat there. Oh, yes, they did x-ray her foot and she had several broken bones. Finally, the chief of the ER got tired of us having to wait and he casted her foot just to get us on our way. We then went to where the car had been towed and it was totaled. The front end was bent in at close to a 90 degree angle. Most remarkably, the air bags did not deploy because the car that hit her hit square between the front bumper sensors. Learned something new there.

Once she was able to drive again, we went to the same folks we bought the Taurus and the Century from and finally bought her a Taurus. For a while we were a two-Taurus family and she still drives hers. Eventually, mine was becoming rather tired, so, we traded it in on a Hyundai Elantra on a day when we swore we were not going to buy a car. My wife is one of the hardest bargainers you will ever meet and she got them to give us exactly the deal SHE wanted. And the best thing about my new car? XM Radio. We got four months free and after that there was NO WAY I was giving it up.

So what have I learned through all this? I’ve learned that I make repairs or perform maintenance on any motor vehicle at my own and the vehicle’s peril. I have learned that a light, two-seat sports car with wide tires and a rear-engine performs very poorly in snow. I have learned that every pick-up truck owned in the United States does NOT have to have a gun-rack, especially if one does not even own a gun. But most of all, I have learned that we are far too reliant on automobiles. This is not a startling conclusion but it is a sobering one. Unless you live in a major urban area in this country, mass transit is non-existent. It’s a sad commentary on the car culture we have allowed to take over our lives and that is slowly strangling us. But, I need to finish up here. I have to hop in the car and get gas. And stop at Dunkin Donuts for coffee, but not the drive-thru window. I WALK into the store to order.