Automotive Autobiography

An Automotive Autobiography? Featuring messy car “divorces?”

Monday was Teo’s and my first outing in a new car. Always a dicey affair. Gratefully, it’s a shakeup which happens to me only like every ten years.

Teo, by the way, likes the car. He can walk around in it on the way to his car seat. Except maybe that his sliding door didn’t work after swimming, or I couldn’t figure it out, so he came in from the other side. Then too, he had to sit in the car in minus 10 degrees (his choice, I invited him to come with me) for almost an hour while the key lady cut about 15 keys hoping to get me four which worked. We gave up at three. She didn’t seem to be affected. Teo and I were a wreck.

It used to be I’d get cars at a discount from my parents. My first car, a green ‘67 VW bug, was one my brother bought new, sold to my parents, and then I got it, like, when I graduated from college. It may even have been free.

Then I had Ganymede, my only named car. He was a white ‘70 VW squareback, again from my parents, which conveyed me from Emmaus (Eastern Pennsylvania) across the country in ‘78. It was the first time I drove that odyssey. I had a job at a prison in Washington state during seminary. I’d have to check my journals from back then to remember why “Ganymede,” maybe because he was a changeling character in “As You Like It,” just like my car turned out to be gutsier than I’d imagined.

My strongest memory of that trip came after four five days of nonstop interstate travel. In Idaho, I took back roads, then dirt roads, I was intent to go off-road, desperate to see the Snake River in a wilderness setting. In the rosy late afternoon, I came to a mud-slough on a forest service road, and paused, pondering a long time, knowing this could be the End, fifty miles from anywhere, if there were a rock down under that muck, or if it were bottomless.

Ganymede made it through. I camped out and named him for his surprising courage and dependability.

Then there were Subarus, two of them, again, handed down from Mom and Dad. They got me through life in New York City (1979-83) and most of my Philadelphia (‘83-‘95). Actually, it was in Philly that I bought my first “luxury” car, a Toyota Cressida, a rear wheel drive compact that my parents found and advised me on. It had an awesome radio which got stole at least once, maybe twice. The hazards of the 80's in Philadelphia. This was the advent of car alarms, screaming half the night in my boundary neighborhood.

Meanwhile my brother Ron and his son Chris were buying Audis at bargain basement prices because there was a big lawsuit in the early 90's against the brand for a transmission which could be accidentally engaged by a child or inattentive adult. I seem to remember a Saab in there too... Anyway, envy, as well as a desire for “good solid German technology” led me around 1994 to ask Ron to help me buy an Audi after the Cressida was running into 200,000.

Pause for insight. I never drove anything up to that point without my father being involved. In fact, I owned two motorcycles in this NYC/Philly era, because Dad was into it. He was way into having, maintaining, and thinking about motor vehicles. He had been a truck mechanic his whole life. Our youth is remembered in photos of people standing in front of new cars and motorcycles. And, when my father was fading, I turned to my brother to help me out. Cars might be our family religion. Our sacrament. Our longing for heaven...

Anyway, we found a ‘90 Audi compact, leather, lots of perks, alarm. I loved it, and then panicked after we’d bought it, because Philadelphia wasn’t a great place for nice cars. So I asked Ron to keep it in suburban Emmaus, our home town, which he did, maybe for a year? I only really connected with the car when, in ‘95, I had to jam it full of my life and drive it across the country to relocate to Holden Village, Chelan, WA.

And, in ‘97, drove it, life-jammed, up to Alaska. I finally sold it when I bought my “dream” Audi, a ‘99 AWD station wagon, at the point (while dating Marin) where I was not only longing for a family, but preparing for it by acquiring a “solid” family car, airbags, safe, reliable. A family trait.

Well, it was a lemon. We came to hate it, for the inevitable towings when it wouldn’t start, the warning lights which were always on, or electronics failing, and every trip to the repair shop which always required $1,000 just to walk through the door.

This car’s worth plummeted from $24K to $8K in 3 years. Not mentioning maybe $12K-14K in fixes. And that was after a year and a half of trying to sell it, the selling price steadily tanking.

During that dark time, when I also had lost my job and we had a son (light!), I’d driven my Mom’s ‘95 Subaru from Pennsylvania to Fairbanks, in, like, 3.5 days, a Sunday afternoon to a Friday Evening in mid-November, with a 42-hour stayover in Saskatoon to see my friend Jann Boyd, who teaches in the Lutheran Seminary there. The Sube is the car of choice in Fbx, AWD and indestructible.

But now we have pulled the trigger on this lifestyle defining moment. Resisting getting a van, we played out alternatives (including poverty) for two months, and ended up getting the van. Good price. Sappy gas mileage. Fun electronics, but will they behave? I got the sense yesterday that either I didn’t understand how to do certain things, or they’re broke.

That sinking feeling called buyers remorse. After several messy car “divorces,” it’s a not-unanticipated family dynamic.