2024/19 CAR

Dave purchased a new car. By new I am speaking literally. The trip home from the dealership registered the first miles on that baby. Usually, for us, new means someone else’s sort-of-old-but-still-pretty-good. Dave and I are both rather frugal. I think we’ve owned brand new cars twice in our 46 years of marriage. Used is good enough for us.

Except for that hiccup in reasonable thinking when we bought a baby blue two door Ford (don’t judge us) all our cars have been made by Toyota or Honda. This is Dave’s third Toyota Rav 4. He is a creature of habit, but fortunately his habits are well founded. He finds something that works for him and he’ll stick with it, which kind of works in my favor since he married me. He will always do his due diligence when he’s decided to buy something new. He’ll read online reviews and study past and current issues of Consumer Reports. In the end, more often than not (but not always) he comes back to tried and true. He’ll imagine himself driving some new color Rav 4 even, but eventually comes back to silver. Historically, we drive our cars well over 200,000 miles before we start thinking of changing.

Dave learned the inner workings of an automobile in his childhood garage on Rolling Green Drive in Bethel Park PA. His dad taught him all the basics. I know that old garage. I can hear, in my memory, the squeak of the door into the kitchen, smell the hint of oil and gasoline and mulching grass clinging to the blades of the lawnmower. I imagine Dave and his dad hovered side by side over the engine of a car, in the days when a dad could show his child exactly how every part worked and fit together. Early on we had Toyotas because Dave knew Toyotas and could fix pretty much anything that went wrong mechanically. He could even do presentable body work after my brother crashed the old green Corolla into a tree. Now days computers have messed up those under-hood relationship development opportunities for dads and kids. It’s a pity. Our friend Preston bought an old car for the express purpose of teaching his son Andrew how to fix it. Preston is a wise man. 

Besides home, our cars carry a remarkable amount of memories. Our old silver Corolla crept through the snow covered streets that Christmas Eve in 1983 when Kate was a newborn baby. Those were the last of the days when new babies were legally allowed to sleep in their mothers’ arms while riding in a car. I can still conjure up the motion of snowflakes swirling toward us, the dusty warmth of that Toyota heater finally kicking in, the scent of new baby mixed with Baby Magic lotion tucked up against my heart. We smashed our little family into that teeny car for years. More than once, before there were things like portable DVD players, we plugged a small portable tv and a full size DVD player into an inverter in that car and the girls watched Sense and Sensibility all the way to Sun Valley Idaho. Dave and I could only listen from the front seat, but we know the movie so well we could imagine every single scene without seeing it. Eventually that car became our son John’s first car. He named it Manuto.  He and his buddies bought fake champagne and a can of spray paint and celebrated on some street in Kaysville when it reached the 200,000 mile mark. I think somewhere in Kaysville there may still be the faint outline of a car spray painted on the asphalt. I am avoiding letting my head go to what memories those kids might have made in that car. They were pretty good kids, but still….

My trusty old vans have all sorts of memories packed in them. It’s a sign of the largeness of our lives that we even still need vans. From large Styrofoam Christmas trees for concert stages, to sound equipment, to grandkids bikes and scooters, to the grandkids themselves… my Toyota van is constantly filled. There’s a portable 8^th seat that’s kept in the back. It fits between the two bucket seats in the second row. We had to bring it out just three days ago to fit all the kids in the car. Once, at the cottage, we had forgotten the extra seat and Dave and John spent a day concocting a homemade portable seat out of wood and pillows so we could drive his family to Chicago on our way home from Michigan. We pack a lot into our adventures in cars.

I regularly pick up Annie’s kids from school and take the girls to ballet classes. I pull into the stream of parent-cars lined up behind Farmington Elementary School. Calvin slides into the front seat while the girls heft their backpacks and their little bodies into the back. Cal says “Gummy, your car always smells like Coke and sunflower seeds. I didn’t know Coke had a smell, but he isn’t wrong about it. I always appreciate a nice tidy car. I just don’t have one. Like my coat pockets, I carry a lot of “just in case” in my car, too. There are indeed sunflower seeds. They keep me awake driving those kids around. And Coke… well, that’s a current weakness. Tess and Beth made up a song with lyrics that include “If you want a drink in Gummy’s car you’ll never find water. But there is always plenty of Coke.”

(Again, don’t judge me.)

In moments when I pause and ponder the advantages in my life that set me apart from my ancestors (and there are a lot of them), I consider having a car to be right there at the top of life changing conveniences. Our world opens up to us when we can so easily and comfortably travel distances. I know it is a privilege to have a trustworthy car, and enough funds to put fuel in it. There were times in my childhood when we did not have a car, or we didn’t have a quarter for a gallon of gas. Thank you, Lord, for this beautiful gift in our lives. Help me remember to cherish it and use it to do good. If you have a car, and it works, bow your head and give thanks.