Automotively Challenged

“I drive a BMW but my dream is to one day own a Hyundai and still be happy.”  This is a line from one of my oldest friends.  Wisdom that amazes me.  Yeah, that’s what I want – what I truly want – too; to spend my life learning how to have more by wanting less.  

For most of my senior year of college, I drove a white 1987 Nissan Stanza.  It was a funny little car that made deafening scraping vacuum sounds, randomly stopped while in motion (usually just as I cut in front of oncoming traffic making left turns across PCH), had no radio, and had monstrous grey-blue sheepskin seat covers that complimented the royal blue velour interior.  All of the fixtures were held together with Velcro.  I inherited it when my grandmother passed away. 

It replaced an old 1991 Chrysler minivan my parents bought when I started kindergarten – I remember being pretty excited when we got it when I was five, but I guess I didn’t imagine at that age that it would still be my mode of transportation at age twenty-one.  The ceiling liner had come completely unglued and it hung like a drapery on the whole roof of the car.  Often some electronic connection would falter and all the electric mechanisms in the car would go wild – the gauges would fly back and forth across their trajectories, the electric locks would compulsively flip back and forth, the windshield wipers would wildly scrape and stutter across the dusty cracked glass, and all of the lights would start flashing.  The passenger’s door wouldn’t fully close (at times I had to rig up something with the seatbelt to keep it from flying open in turns.  The sliding side door wouldn’t open, so everyone in the back had to climb out the trunk.  If the RPM dropped too low, the oil pressure would plummet and ran the risk of seizing the engine.  The entire family got in the car together to celebrate 350,000 miles on the odometer.   No air conditioning.  The steering wheel had begun to melt and would leave a greyish residue on your hands about the viscosity of pine sap.  Embarrassed doesn’t come close to the way I felt about that van.  Mortified comes closer, but still doesn’t capture the sickness that reverberated within my entire rib cage anytime I passed someone I knew.  My friends called it “the immigrant van.”  It was funny to them, but somehow could not be funny to me.  Do we call that pride?  I think that’s the word. 

There was lots of sorrowful begging for my parents to think of another automotive option for me, but it just wasn’t going to happen and that was that.  My mother used to tell me that as soon as I didn’t want a new car anymore a new one would somehow show up in my life.  Every time she said this I would excuse myself and go release my fury into a pillow.  I don’t know why this was such a big deal for me.  I am not an otherwise materialistic person, and while I love clothes I wouldn’t consider myself terribly image-conscious.  But anytime the car conversation started, my body would tighten with anger and hatred in a manner no other occasion has ever given it cause to do. 

When my grandmother was no longer able to drive, the Nissan passed to me.  It was blissful.  Anything to get rid of that van.  I think the two were really equal in awfulness to the outsider’s eye, but for some reason the Nissan cracked me up where the minivan had made me angry.  Perhaps it’s because I chose to take the Nissan where I did not choose the minivan?  Perhaps it was the connection to my adored and departed grandmother?  I don’t know.  But I was fond of it, and didn’t care who saw it or drove around in it or what.  No more anger, no more looking for a way out. 

And then one weekend my father just up and announced that we were going car shopping.  Graduation was a couple of months away, but I already had my graduation gift planned and picked out.  We looked at some great used cars, and then for some reason my dad decided to spring for the brand spanking new Mini I’d had my eye on for years.  The decision was made in about two days.  I guess my mom was right – it just somehow appeared the second I stopped caring. 

A roommate once told me about a theory of hers that we long most to be the one thing we can never be. 

She said this while we were sitting inside that Nissan in the carport of the mobile home we lived in on Point Dume in Malibu our senior year.  We liked to do that periodically, to sit in the car and talk, go for a quick drive around the Point to look at the moon over the glittering Bel Air Bay, somehow create a physical barrier between ourselves and everything we had established that we were inside the house we’d chosen, decorated, and lived in.  Our best conversations happened on those drives.  This comment referred to a theme that ran through all of the papers I wrote in my English classes. I had this subconscious fascination with nuns, cloistered women, anything in or of a monastery, ascetics, any character who renounced worldly things for a higher spiritual path.  

It’s like that Frost poem I included in my last post.  My life is running straight toward the varied and exciting land, and I am excited about that.  It is where my gifts lie and where my energy comes from.  And yet there’s a longing to not care in the least about it.  I love the things the world produces, but (while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that in the least bit – it’s what we were meant for) I wish I didn’t.  It’s not the sort of longing that will make me alter my life plans, but the sort that will maintain the incessant tension and tug that will always keep me asking, wondering, yearning, and seeking.  And, as I've said before, these are blessed, for what worse thing could there be in life than an end point?

Today I drive a Mini that I adore.  My dream is to someday drive a 1991 minivan and love it.