There is no telling when I will get my car back. The part it needs, it turns out, is out of production. My mechanic says his parts guy is getting him one from somewhere, but it's not in yet. So now it's the weekend, so I guess that makes it sometime next week. I hope. Or else it's car shopping time, I guess.I do not function well without a car. If I lived in a city (which sometimes, oddly, I can picture myself doing, a nice small city, like Hoboken, maybe) I wouldn't have one, need one, or want one. But I live in a suburb, and the suburbs were designed for people with cars. You know what I mean.
You might wonder why K still has use of a car and I don't. It's an easy answer. I work from 7:30 to 3:00, give or take. She works from 8:00 to 1:00, most days. She can drop me off and pick me up and still get to work. The reverse is not true. On Thursdays, she has to get to class at 5:00, and I got nothing, maybe just a nail appointment, like yesterday. Class beats nails, I'm pretty sure. And the Sibs has kindly offered her car if I need it again, or to pick me up from school, or whatever. So that's nice.
But I wish I had a car.
So I'm thinking about cars. K said something the other day about getting her first car at 17, which she did; it's the same 95 Chevy Cavalier sedan she's driving now, five years later. I think it cost $4000, and we got it for her because the alternative was that I would have had to share my car with her, which would have meant me not having a car lots of times. (She was, among other things, property manager for the school drama club, which involved lots of errands as well as many late rehearsals.) And my first car was ...
The first car "given" to me for my use was a 1962 Oldsmobile Super 88, baby blue. It was s top-notch car when my father got it new, a business car. In 1968 or so, he bought it from the business so my sister could have a car to get to and from student teaching, and when she got married in 1970, he let her keep it for a few months until she bought her first car. Then I got to drive it for a few months until the insurance expired, when he got rid of it. It was a quirky car; missed my father when he didn't drive it for long periods of time and would refuse to start for anyone under any circumstances until he came and sat in it and started it right up.
(Here's a lengthy aside. My father had only one criterion for buying a car: it had to have a tremendous trunk. The job of making all the deliveries and pickups in the business had fallen to him when Murray, his business partner, was paralyzed by polio in 1953 -- Murray had been the "outside guy" in their business plan -- and he needed to carry large cartons and didn't want them to be seen by passers-by. So he always drove a huge car of some kind, although the Olds was the only one he bought for the family and therefore was passed down to one of us.)
Otherwise, I borrowed my mother's car when I needed one. I had my own full set of keys to whatever cars we had -- my father had given me a set as my present on my 17th birthday --
so I was never begging. If I had a school vacation or some other day off, I could have the car as long as I got up early to drive Shirl to work and picked her up later. This was something of a pain from time to time, but I appreciated it. When I moved home to finish my last two years of college locally, I got her car, a 1967 Chevy Biscayne, gold with black interior, and she got a brand new cute Dodge Dart. The old gold Chevy was the first car we owned with air conditioning. (The Olds had been our first car with seatbelts, which Jack had installed after he had the car for a year or two and seatbelts were all the rage. He never personally used them, though.)
The plan was that, like my sister, I could use the car until the Hubs and I bought a car after we were married. We got a 1977 Honda Civic, green. It was like a Barbie car, extremly tiny and adorable. If I turned around in the driver's seat, like to back up, my fingertips could touch the window in the hatchback.
So there's the story of my first car, all three of them. Since then, I've driven a little red wagon -- a Chevy Cavalier, I think an 84 or 85 -- and two leased Astro vans. And now my little Tracker, a 98. I'm very, very fond of my little buddy. It has no pick-up whatsoever, and just backing out of the driveway is a little reminiscent of the noise and back-and-forth movement of the truck the Joads drove to California. I'll be sad to see it go.
The Hubs, btw, is driving Jack's last car, a 91 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera, white, with all the trim missing off one door. It's a medium size car, pretty much, although it has the requisite humongous trunk. Oh wait, I guess I did get another one after all.
If I could only get the Hubs to buy a car, I'd drive Jack's until I needed to. I wouldn't love it, but I'd drive it. I'd really rather not have to buy two, or god forbid three, cars at once. But my husband is the only man in America who is not eager to just go out and buy a new car, even though he needs one and has the green light to just go do it. The anomalous man.
Really. I just want to come and go as I please, you know? Isn't that what grown-ups are supposed to be able to do?
