Car Talk

So today, I gave my car away. Ok, donated. Either way, it's gone. I've never really been attached to cars, per se. I mean, I like them to run and all, and I like having cars that I can fix, and I can fix lots of things. But if there's a group talking about cars: old cars, new cars, luxury cars, sports cars -- I generally have to nod in what I feel to be appropriate moments and ways. Seems to have worked, to date.


I've only owned (solely or jointly) five cars. I gave away a car once before, but it wasn't technically mine. That is actually a fun story -- it all happened on the last Saturday of spring break, 1987, I think. I had awoken, had breakfast, packed, and was waiting for my friend, Bruce, to pick me up for a ride back to State College. My brothers Brian and Greg were there at the house, but Mom and Dad were off in Minnesota visiting Dave and his family, which at that point included Cam. So, as usual when my folks went out of town, there was a problem with the well. At that point in my education, I'd only had 3 years worth of engineering school (which ended up at about 25% of the final count), so naturally I climbed down into the well pit, only to discover that I had no idea what I was doing. Oh, I had watched about a hundred times, as Dad reprimed the pump, but as I was usually looking down at his back while he did it. Which, now that I think about it, is mostly how I learned to fix my cars, too, which makes me wonder if I should really be doing that.


Anyway, as I climbed down there, our dog, Becket, was poking around the pit. When I climbed back up, he was not. Not particularly strange, his running off. He actually ran away pretty much every Wednesday for several years in a row. Once he ran away on a Thursday, got hit by a car, and had pins and plates installed in both hips. And as soon as he healed, he resumed his just-about-weekly schedule, and apparently this week he had picked Saturday. 


The dog was gone. At the same time, Greg mentioned that the Ford Maverick we had sitting idle in the driveway was due to be picked up by some guys for scrap. I headed in, and called my dad in MN, so he could explain the procedure. I called, and he was going to call me back for some reason, so I wandered into the living room. HBO was on, and the movie was The Brother From Another Planet, which I had not yet seen except for one scene in which Fisher Stevens does a cameo as a guy on the subway who shows a card trick to the protagonist. The only reason I even stopped to watch it this time was that this very scene was playing, and as he did the trick, I had one of those "eureka" moments where I figured out how it worked, and I've been doing that trick ever since.


So, the story so far: pump's not running, dog's gone, figured out a card trick. Dad calls back, and explains how to prime the pump, which isn't complicated and I really should have been able to do it, but there we were. Out to the pit I went, and as I was climbing in, a car screeches into the driveway, and my neighbor jumps out. "Jeff! Did you lose your dog!" he says, "Jump in, I saw him up the road!" So, I jump in, and he peels out, gravel flying. He pulls the car maybe 100 feet to the next driveway, slams the car into park, and jumps out. "He was just here a second ago!" as he points to the obvious absence of dog. "Well, thanks anyway," I said, and walked back to prime the pump. As I get home, there are now two guys and a truck parked in front of the Maverick, and the guys are looking around the car. "We talked to Vic," one said, "is this the car?" "Yep." "Do you have the keys?" he asked, and I pointed to the trunk lock with the keys sticking in it -- which was right in front of him, and he was clearly looking at it -- and said, "Yep, right there." "Okay!" they said, and they set about loading the car, and I went to prime the well, which was as easy as it should have been in the first place. When I got out of the pit, they were done and gone.


Back in the house, I call my dad back to report that the well was primed and working, and by the way the guys came for the car. "Did you get the fifty bucks?" he asks. "I did not." Thus was performed my first car donation, or possibly a car theft depending on how you look at it -- but I couldn't stay to chat about it, because Bruce had arrived, and honked for me to come out. I put my bag in, and sat down, and Bruce goes to back out of the driveway when he says, "Hey, Jeff, do you want to get your dog out of the way?" The dog had returned. I like it when stories wrap themselves up like that.


Today's donation was pretty straightforward. We gave the Corolla to an outfit in Wexford that will find a person or family who needs a car for work or whatever. The folks showed up, we did the paperwork, I gave them the keys, and off they went, in less time that it takes me to do that card trick.

But this car, of all cars, was special. It was, after all, the first car I had bought new. And it was the car I bought on March 8, 1997, which is precisely the day after I proposed to Chris. Made for a very expensive weekend, but I think it's worked out pretty well! That car did have over a hundred and sixty thousand miles on it, after all!