I knew what I was getting into. When I was barely 20 years old, and this cute blond guy kept coming in to the office on campus where I worked, I had hints that my life would be like this. Our first "date" was a cold, snowy day in early January, when I convinced him not to ride his bicycle on his errands, but rather to let me drive him. We went to his storage unit and then to an auto junkyard, to get a part to fix his 1971 Datsun 510 wagon. A day or two later, he picked me up to go hang out at one of his friend's apartments, and he had left his car running in my parking lot, for fear that it wouldn't start again when we came back out to start our second date. All of my family tenses up a little whenever I use his name and the word "car" in a sentence. Our friends used to gauge how good or bad a group camping event was going to be by how bad our car trouble was on the way to the campsite. (It was an inverse relationship: bad car trouble = good event, no car trouble = our group getting kicked out of Sand Dunes National Monument and having a group member roll her car on the way out.) He once reached down on the side of the road, where we were broken down, and grabbed a smashed soda can to bridge the faulty circuit in his Datsun's electrical system to restart his engine. I knew the kind of guy I married.
He raised daughters who love a good jalopy. He bought a 1986 Toyota 4Runner for our older daughter to rebuild when she was 15, so she'd know her way around an engine. That car has stuck around ever since, needing not one but THREE new engines, and having been stolen and retrieved at least once. I hate it and it hates me. That is not going to change. The younger daughter once had the newest car in our family, when she got a PT Cruiser that was a mere four years old at the time. It sat, gathering cobwebs and mold, in the reserved parking place for the condo we just sold, for most of the last year. Daddy finally got the car running a few weeks ago, and I think daughter is finally ready to see it turned in to a dealer for an upgrade. At least she is considering it. If she's anything like her father (she is), it will take her a year to decide what kind of car to replace it with, and another year finding the exact one she wants.
I'm the patient wife who doesn't complain when the lemon Cherokee engine is being rebuilt on the living room floor. (I was actually interested in learning a little on that one.) I've put up with project cars lying dormant in my back yard, garage, and driveway (one time all three places at once). Two years ago I got the only brand-new-with-warranty car I've ever had, and possibly the last, if past is prologue. It feels amazing to have a car that I don't have to worry about. I feel like a queen when I drop in unannounced for my oil change at the dealership.
For the last couple days, the hood has been up on the pickup truck. I asked yesterday what the deal was, and he said the transmission has been shifting very hard. I remembered noticing that, and didn't ask any more questions. That truck has been a workhorse, and we have driven the hell out of it. It's towed trailers to Colorado twice already since winter, and we were looking at doing it again in a few weeks. Somewhere just after it rolled over 250,000 miles (recently), he did an oil change, and he added a little transmission fluid this week. This morning it gasped and tripped coming home from buying paint and lumber. This afternoon, on the way to picking up the project Jeep's transmission, it passed out on the side of the road. The man had it towed to the shop that was his destination anyway, and got an estimate for time and cost to re-rebuild the transmission, something that was done in New Mexico five years ago. This really puts a new layer of pressure on everything we are doing right now. We have no hauling vehicle to get supplies for the house, nor for removing the old carpeting to the dump (saves us a reasonable chunk off the cost of new carpet). But we look at it this way: the timing is actually good for us. Imagine, he said, that the engine crapped the bed three hours into our final drive with all of the animals, when we move. Indeed. Wouldn't be the first time car trouble stranded us and our pets on a major cross country move. In fact, I'm trying hard to name a single move when that did NOT happen...
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