A road trip can’t happen without a car, but I just don’t know about this minivan. With 135,000 miles on it, it shows no signs of quitting. Isn’t that encouraging in this age of planned obsolescence?
Sure, but I want a Mini Cooper. A Honda Element. A milk- delivery truck. A BSA motorcycle, circa 1958. The midlife crisis cliché always involves a motor vehicle. Usually, the protagonist is a man, which I ain’t. In fact, I began my doomed dalliances with engines when I was only 17, and the details are fuzzy. When I can’t sleep, I lie with open eyes, trying to remember the machines in my past, awash in regret. I never appreciated you when I had you. Can you ever forgive me?
Freewheeling teen
I spent my teen years in Manhattan – New York, not Kansas – and I don’t know how anyone learns to drive there. At 19, I learned to ride a motorcycle in Tucson, and then I had to have one. If one was good, two were better. At that time I rarely had enough cash on hand for a full tank of gas, yet I bought one used bike after another. After a while, drunk on internal combustion, I spent $50 on a Pontiac GTO, a lot of it held together with string.
Having no concept of death or dismemberment, I taught myself how to drive a car on the freeways of northern California. It was a little trickier than riding a motorcycle, what with that big metal box surrounding me, but I got the hang of it in time to begin my usual cycle of trading down – from the GTO, which was mechanically quite sound, to a U.S. Postal Service Mail Van that wouldn’t go above 50 mph, to a rusted Jeep whose brakes failed in such a way that I plowed into an Oakland city bus and had to leave the state.
In Denver, my long-suffering father bought me a brand-new 1980 Ford Club Wagon van. I sold it and bought a Fiat with a removable hard-top that blew head gaskets like Bazooka blows bubbles. I descended further, to a mustard-colored Maverick, a Subaru that had been kicked in by a horse, and then back up, to a Yamaha 650 Seca motorcycle, my very first new bike, which I loved like a brother and treated like an insane relative locked in the attic. It wasn’t the best way to travel over Vail Pass in a snowstorm either.
It went on that way for years.
By contrast, my father had only seven cars in his 78 years, and he loved them and treated them better than either of his wives. I particularly remember the 1969 Impala – green, sleek and too big for a modern parking space. The slightest hint of schmutz was whisked away with a special broom. That was the way to own a car, and I still don’t.
Hip-challenged
Surely my current ride won’t tolerate the abuse forever. But what does it expect? A car supposed is supposed to be the switch that turns off reality. On the way to Home Depot, or New Mexico, you should feel rebellious and hip. How can you do that in a minivan that hasn’t been washed in four months and is stained with bicycle grease, “washable” marker pens and the expelled fillings of wrap sandwiches?
Rather than stopping when I get behind the wheel, reality intensifies, distilling itself something like the sludge that accumulates in a Mr. Coffee when you forget to turn it off. My car is too big to require that I leave my life behind. I’ve picnicked in it, and worse – privacy glass is there for privacy, right? I’ve slept in it, changed diapers in it and read books in it when I was supposed to be working.
The Honda people say it will last into the three-hundred- thousands. This is supposed to be good news. Yet I still dream of divorcing in favor of a trophy car. Maybe a fuel-saving hybrid, a racy Cayenne or the Harley I surely deserve at my age.
Identity upgrade
Then I will stop hauling around sheets of 4-by-8 plywood, shedding dogs, viscous science projects. Then I will acquire an expensive pair of sunglasses and have something rejuvenating done to my face, so that it no longer looks like a distressed leather sofa. Then my means of transport will reflect my inner vision of who I am.
But then I will have to buy a new satellite radio, which has made my living-room-on- wheels not only bearable, but fun. My magic new scanner skips maniacally from Lightnin’ Hopkins to Run-D.M.C. to Frank Sinatra as if it were reading my mind. With a mattress in the back and a cooler full of ice, I could drive forever.
Or I could trade it, and go into hock for a fantasy.
Decisions, decisions.
Robin Chotzinoff is a freelance writer who lives in Evergreen.
