For two years I drove a run-down, fifteen year old car. Its paint was faded and peeling. It had mismatched tires, the engine power of a colicky toddler on a tri-cycle and the pick-up of a hyperactive tortoise on steroids. The windows on the car were covered with this dark sun-control film, which could protect me from not only sunlight but the fall-out from a nuclear blast! The stereo system was a misnomer. Only the right side speakers worked so there was nothing stereo about it! The headlights were so weak I strapped a torch with 2 AAA size batteries to the front of my car. A nighttime car trip was invariable preceded by a religious ritual, invoking gods from every faith and religion, calling on them to light my way with the radiance of their divinity or at the least bless me with enough of a pay raise to put a new light bulb in the torch! (I gave up on the headlights a long time ago!). I’m quite sure driving around in that car I used up all my luck and also borrowed heavily on all the lives I may have had on this earth (for all you non-Hindu’s...this may yet make a believer of you…if I’m still here on this earth its because all my re-incarnations have been used up!) I had over-drafted my account so badly that I was beginning to borrow on the nine lives of my neighbor’s cat!
The one luxury I afforded myself was an expensive air-freshener. It came in this tiny little spray bottle holding no more than a thimbleful of the stuff. I scoffed at the Ad which declared it to be the ultimate odor fighting formula. I would need gallons of this spray to mask the sundry odors that had taken up habitation in my car. Nevertheless, I decided to use it. One spray was all it took! The smell was so overpowering that the FBI declared my car a national threat and quarantined it for fear of a bio-terrorism attack (I had a similar experience when I took up cooking!) It also completely annihilated my nasal cells, proving to be (as the Ad declared) the one effective solution for the strange odors in my car…I just can’t smell anything with my nose!
The brakes have a story of their own. Metal squealed against metal every time I pressed down on them (brake pads were a luxury…I was not kidding when I said the air-freshener was the only luxury I could afford!) Sometimes, the squealing got so loud I felt sorry for them and would just stick my left leg out the door to stop the car. The weird part was that this was not new to me! The car was so small, anytime I had more than 4 people in it half my body was stuck out of the door anyway!
The redeeming factor about the car was the air-conditioning system. “Cold as Ice” the Ad claimed when I went in to buy it. They weren’t kidding! I store all my beer in the glove compartment now!
It served me uncomplaining and undemanding till the very last moment, when I traded it in for a brand new spanking ride. The tears in my eyes threatened to overwhelm the fragile resistance of my ego, as I traded keys with the car salesman. Clearing out the last remnants of my presence in the vehicle, a whiff of the smell inside bringing back a thousand memories, each one experienced inside the confines of this vehicle, coffee stained upholstery and all. My first car.
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