I find guilt in the most ridiculous places

Due to unexpected popular demand, here is a generic picture of the car I got (picture stolen from cars.com):



Except my sister-in-law (who had the car before me) had all the windows tinted, so be sure to keep that in mind. That's the paint color I have, though.

No road trips yet (gas is $4.25 for fuck's sake), though I did take it out for my favorite drive on Sunday night:

Down the highway to Lower Wacker Drive (an underground thoroughfare that has changed quite a bit since it was featured in the big chase scene in "Blues Brothers"), over to Lake Shore Drive (where I get smacked in the face with a stunning view of the lake), up to a kind of up-scale neighborhood, around a waste of space called the Nature Museum ("Here are the types of grass you'll find in Illinois" and they don't mean the fun kind), then racing back down again. There are few things in the world that calm me down as much as that drive does.

My old car, Dox, would die when he was idling so I'd sit at red lights with my foot on the gas. I still find myself doing that. Also, if I found myself driving a nice car in the past 5 years or so, it was a car that I had borrowed that had automatic transmission. Dox was a stick, and so is the Kia (tentatively named Trixie), but I forget that I'm driving a stick with Trixie and sometimes find myself going 35 in second gear.

I'm having to re-learn how to drive stick. Trixie has four working speakers and no broken engine parts, and no dial on the dashboard telling me my current RPMs, so I have to really pay attention to know when to switch gears. Also, Dox's transmission was in such poor shape that I could switch gears with just one finger. Trixie has a good transmission, so I have to actually have my hand free to switch gears.

Trixie doesn't have power steering, so every time I turn I say to myself, "Gun show. GUN SHOW!" trying to really put some muscle in it so I have something to bring to the (you guessed it) gun show.

Trixie is clean, doesn't smell funny, has no rust or dents, has four working doors and five working seat belts, a fancy flip-down stereo, gets a modest 26 miles to the gallon (Dox got 9...that's not a typo, he got nine), and doesn't reek of gas for ten minutes after you kill the engine. There is no cause for embarrassment when I drive her, and people at the bus stop no longer look in my direction with hope and then disappointment after realizing it's not their bus, it's just Dox's muffler. In every way (except air conditioning) she is a vast improvement.

But in my heart of hearts, I miss Dox every damn day. If I didn't have an audience around me when they put him on the junk yard's tow truck, I honestly would have been in tears. He was my trusty steed through some of the most amazing and scary years of my life, and I loved him like an old friend.

Even when he was broken down, even when his expired tags got me arrested, I still loved that car. There have been very few times in my life that I have felt like a completely unredeemable asshole, and selling him to the junk yard for $150 is definitely in the top 5.

The guy who put him on the flat bed didn't understand that his brakes didn't work and that he'd have to pull Dox up the ramp with the chain. When he realized it and brought Dox back down the the street, he scraped Dox's muffler. I wanted to punch him.

Poor Doxology

Remember that scene in "Neverending Story" where Atrayu had to watch his trusty horse, Artax, sink to a miserable death in the Swamp of Sadness? That's basically what's going on with my car.

My poor car, Doxology. Named after Sam Hamilton's horse, which is a reference to Steinbeck's "East of Eden" for those of you not in the know.

I know it's stupid, it's just a car, it's not a horse or a family member or even alive at all, but damn - it's Doxology. That car has been there for more with more consistency and grace than anyone else I've known in the six years I've had him. He's moved me more times than I can count - sometimes across town and once it was to Maryland. On the drive back from Maryland, with 90% of everything I owned crammed into every available inch of the car, a blizzard chased us through five states for two days. Doxology held on, though - we got through just fine.

When we got t-boned in that hit and run, he still ran. You couldn't use the passenger door at all, and ever since then the wind might catch that door just the wrong way and give the car an unexpected tug, but he could stil get from point A to point B. He wasn't pretty, but I'm not a proud person, so it didn't matter.

I have this family that isn't my family. I call them my adopted family, which is close enough and not really the point of the story. The youngest daughter in the family, she and I are pretty close, like sisters. At least, we were when she lived here. On warm summer nights she and I would ride around in Doxology - through lower Wacker Drive, up Lake Shore Drive, around that park across the street from Lincoln Park Zoo, then back home. Just me and my sister, blaring music and joyriding. I miss having her here, miss her fucking with the radio and throwing trash out the window, no matter how much I yelled at her for it.

Sometimes when I drive along now, I remember when I was in Maryland and my sister's kids were in the car. The youngest would crawl up to her car seat and say, "Aunt Maggie, you have to clean this car!" And I'd laugh and tell her to make a car payment and I'd think about it.

I remember driving with all three of my sister's kids one day after there had been a lot of snow. My back window was caked in snow. I warmed up the car but couldn't find the snow brush, so the snow stayed on the back window. As we rounded a corner, the kids were all turned around (as best they could, being buckled in) trying to watch the patch slide off the back. It slid a little one way, sort of teasing the audience. It slid up when we hit a bump, then back down; its audience was captive and brimming with excitement. When it finally slid off into a ditch, the kids cheered like it was some great accomplishment. Their cheers still ring in my ears sometimes, when I need a reason to smile.

Doxology has been there for me when I'm scared, or excited, or crying so hard I can barely drive. It's helped deliver me and countless friends home safely. Most of those friends are now scattered and gone, but Doxology and I still muddle through.

Long gone are the days when I'd drive down to Kankakee just for the sake of going for a drive in the middle of the night. Hell, for the past three weeks I considered myself lucky if I could make it over the bridge at the end of my street. Gone are the days I'd spend waiting to get back to my car, where I had the day's only guaranteed air conditioning or heat, depending on the season.

Poor Dox. I changed his plug wires last night, it made everything worse. I tried to drive around the block, he froze up on me. The steering wheel locked when I was in an intersection with moving traffic. I had to re-start him four times just to get back around the rest of the block. He's twelve years old, with 122,000 miles. That's pretty good for an Escort that's been through what he's been through. A friend of mine back east says it's time to do the respectful thing and just let him go out with some dignity. She's not the one facing a 90-minute commute (each way) now that Dox has two tires in the grave. She's also not the one who has only been able to count on Dox and Dox alone all these years. Friends, lovers, family - they came and went. Dox held on. Dox got me where I needed to go. Dox was my 2-door sanctuary with a hatch back and a busted dome light. Dox was my Artax, and my empty wallet is his Swamp of Sadness.

FUCK

What the fuck is wrong with my car?



All of a sudden, the passenger door is catching on the front fender when it opens, bending the fucking fender under the door. This started Monday afternoon. It was fine Monday morning.

Also, it still stalls when it's idling too long (45+ seconds), and it sounds like it needs a new front exhaust manifold, whatever the fuck that is, that's what they told me it was the last time I heard that noise. That was $200. Fuck.

I wish I worked closer to home so I could take the el, and I wish my fucking shitty community college were serviced by reliable bus lines, so I could take the fucking bus. I think I'd sell my car, then, and just use a zip car instead.

Fuck.