Our Cars

This weekend Tiffy, A-Fooze, and I went to the outdoor theater to see a play by George Bernard Shaw. We got rained on but came prepared with rain ponchos and whipped them out as soon as the first drops began to fall; the people to our right said, "You girls have been here before!" and bought their own ponchos during the intermission, while the people to our left simply left. I'm not sure which part of "outdoor theater" they didn't understand...

Saturday my plugged-in Mideastern band had another gig at the Mideastern restaurant. It was also a birthday party for three people, one of whom was turning 92, and a going-away party for a fourth person who was going abroad for a year. The birthday "boy" had a huge sheet of baklava instead of a birthday cake; there were lots of candles on it but I have no idea if there were actually 92. It did light the room up quite a bit, though.

Unfortunately, neither of these activities would have been very easy for me to participate in if I did not own a car. In this culture, it is so hard to get by without one, and the outdoor theater is 45 minutes away while I needed to haul a mandolin and an amp to the gig. It would be wonderful to be one of those people who does not own a car, and I try to minimize my use of it (for example, I do not drive to work), but I have a confession to make: I love my car. Her name is Erin Caitlyn O'Honda because she is green and because I bought her the day after St. Patrick's Day a few years back. I loved my previous Honda Accord, Sydney, so much that my friends practically had to pry her away from me. She was being held together with duct tape, had one of her "monster eye" headlights that couldn't close so that she looked like she was winking, and her power steering no longer worked... but she still ran. Sydney was the first car I ever owned. Tiffy sold her to me and I drove her for ten years, until she was 17. (As Antoshka said, "That car is 120 in people years - it's time to let go!") When it would have cost more to repair her faulty exhaust system than she was worth, I finally donated her to charity for a tax write-off. Good old Syd - even the charity people couldn't fix her, so they sold her for parts. I guess I really did drive her into the ground!

After Tiffy sold Sydney to me, she bought yet another Honda Accord. The color is San Marino red so she calls her car "Dan," although she is not a Dolphins fan.

Richard Bonomo did not own his first car until he was in his 40s. He still has the Bonomobile, an Isuzu station wagon which has suffered much abuse, though most of it not from Rich. Just this past winter, a snowplow backed into it! Yet the Bonomobile still doesn't look as bad as Sydney did at the end. True story: I once ran into a fire hydrant (don't ask) and had to shell out $300 for a new radiator but couldn't afford to fix the cosmetic damage. Within a fortnight, some drunken fool driving his girlfriend's mother's SUV ran into a bunch of parked cars, and so Sydney was fixed and looked as good as new at no charge to me! The only times I really got mad at old Syd were when she sometimes wouldn't start on hot summer days, which turned out to be an easy fix, and toward the end when she would always eat my cassette tapes. She especially liked to eat techno and Baroque music.

Kathbert's car is a blue Honda Fit that looks really small on the outside but very roomy on the inside, so she calls it Tardis. (Since Hardingfele is going to ask anyway, that's a Dr. Who reference.) She used to have a little tan car, I think it was a Nissan, that was 21 before it died.

You may have noticed a pattern here. Yes, my friends and I are part of the problem, not the solution, when it comes to the financial issues of the American car makers. What can we do? We prefer Japanese cars.

Famous Hat