It is Nascar weekend in KCK, and there seems to be a lot of excitement about it. They already set up lanes on the freeway yesterday to route all the expected traffic into the stadium and still allow other people to flow through those areas. The stadium is prepped and ready to go, some of the teams have already arrived and set up shop, the vendors have brought their wares to show and sell. It is quite the phenomenon, one I must admit, I do not understand.
It is baffling to me that people would be interested in spending time and gas driving to a stadium, and then paying to see people race around in a circle. If they consider that big entertainment, I wonder why they don't just go sit on a freeway overpass and watch the cars traveling underneath them? If you really enjoy watching people speed, you can go on any local highway and see breathtaking chances taken at high speed on a minute by minute basis.
The cars are covered with signs and logos and brilliant colors you would not see parked in a neighborhood garage. I would like to throw it out there that I, for one, would be happy to put a company logo on the side of my car if someone wants to throw money at me. You would think some company would be pleased to be associated with an attractive, youthful woman driving a Dodge Dakota, but so far, there are no takers.
I have never been one to have a love affair with a car. For me, it represents a way to get from here to there, an expensive drain on my bank account that never seems to end. I am currently supporting three cars, and their meals are more expensive than my kids, their checkups more frequent, and their insurance just as costly. I would love to cut back, but with three drivers, and our suburban world, it's not likely to happen any time soon.
I remember the day I first got behind the wheel of a car. It was with a terrifying combination of power and fright that I sat in the driver's seat, facing down the highway. My mother was in the passenger seat reading her Bible when I took my first foray into the adult of world of driving. [No, seriously, she really was. She had to go to her Bible study the next morning, and she wasn't prepared, so she had me drive while she did her study.]
I practiced going down the on-ramp, and then immediately went back up the next off-ramp, much to my mother's surprise and consternation. I was exhausted and already experiencing the kind of muscle strain usually felt only by people climbing Mount Everest. I tried to pry my fingers away from the wheel, and found them cramped into the curled 10 and 2 position, arms stiff, shoulders sore, and head starting to ache.
My mom encouraged me to keep going, even though I was ready to turn the responsibility back over to her right then. I think her motive might have been more expeditious opportunism than an actual desire to sit in the passenger seat, especially with someone so obviously unprepared, but I have to give her credit - other than reading the Bible, and probably doing a fair amount of praying, she ignored the worst of it, and praised the best of it, and I have positive memories of the first time behind the wheel. I also have positive feelings about the nap I required at the end, when I was safely home again in the bosom of my familiar sofa, dreaming about the thrill of the open road.
Back then, we had a little red Pinto station wagon, and it was a handy little car. You could fit an amazing amount of stuff into that car, especially when you put the back seat down. It wasn't a cool car by the standards of my kids, but where I grew up, if you had a car at all and got to drive to school in it, you were the very definition of cool. I did not have my own car, so on the very rare occasions when I got to drive to school, I felt very privileged indeed. It's all in the perspective, really.
I finally got my very own car when I was in college. Since the Pinto had worked out so well for my mom, we got another one for me, a cute little hatchback, brown in color, with low miles and a stick shift. Rest assured, it was retro-fitted with the gas tank protector so that it wouldn't blow up if I got rear-ended, but I wasn't worried about that at the time. Being a dependent teenager, I was more concerned with the price tag, which was in the right range for my mother to say yes.
I felt an unbelievable power, owning my own car. It gave me the option of going anywhere I wanted any time I wanted, and it was exhilarating for someone who was accustomed to being restricted, to have that kind of freedom. Gas was under a dollar a gallon, and you could fill up your tank for a little over ten dollars at the time. So getting in the car and taking a drive, just for the fun of it, was still a reasonable form of entertainment.
I used that car to go home a lot as a college freshman, because I was homesick for the home and the mom I was so eager to leave just a few months before that. My mother never looked so good as when I was watching her car threading its way down the freeway away from me at the end of a weekend. Isn't it interesting how the same woman who had nothing of interest to say, at least as far as you were concerned, the day you graduated from high school was suddenly the one person whose opinion you needed on a constant basis? I laugh at my son, who calls me all the time to chat, but I suspect if I had owned a cell phone I might well have done the same thing.
My little brown Pinto took me to college for four years, then to graduate school, and into a marriage. It even shared one of the happiest moments of my life, as we drove our newborn son away from the hospital, feeling like bandits getting away with a crime. I still find it a little hard to believe they actually let us walk out the door with that defenseless baby, because two less prepared people you will never find. I will never forget the giddy joy I experienced as we drove down the street and he really belonged to us.
Eventually, of course, the car gave up the ghost, and we were forced to trade it in on a new car. That should have been my first clue that the person to whom I had chosen to plight my troth may not have been quite as substantial as I thought. While I worried over gas mileage, repair costs, engine size, servicing availability - you know, the practical stuff [never a word that should be applied to the ex, Mr. Down to Earth] - he was enthralled with the fact that the seats could rock. I am not entirely sure why he thought it would be a positive thing to drive down the road like Granny in the back of the truck heading off to Beverly Hills, but that was the thing that sold him on that car.
That worked out about as well as you would expect, of course. By the time we got rid of it, we had spent more on maintenance than the original purchase price. We replaced that car piece by piece, starting with the front end just a few days after we brought it home from the dealership.
The ex always considered himself to be a very funny guy, and to prove it, he came home every day and told me he had gotten into an accident with the new car. I am not really sure why he thought it was big fun to induce a stroke into his still hormonal wife every afternoon, but that was his game, and he stuck with it. So when he came home and woke me up to inform me that he had smashed up the car in a black ice accident, I thought he was kidding, and told him to go away and fool someone else.
Unfortunately, this time he wasn't joking, and the entire front end had collapsed like the tin foil accordion it was. Renault went wrong for a reason, and I'm thinking this might have had something to do with it. Of course, I'm sure they didn't count on someone driving the car off the lot and into the trunk of another car, but if not, they had reckoned without considering my ex.
Always the huckster looking for a deal, my Monty Hall in running shoes found a shop that was willing to do the work for less money than the insurance company was willing to give us. This seemed like a great thing until about six minutes later, when the hood of the car turned a dull chalky white - the rest of the car was a deep charcoal gray. Naturally, the shop refused to stand by its lack of work ethic, and we lived with that condition reminding us daily that he is a bad driver, and if it sounds too good to be true, there is going to be a catastrophe associated with it.
Although I have owned quite a variety of cars, my favorite car is the one I am currently driving. Not that one specifically, just whichever one I'm driving at the time. I don't care about cars, don't care what they look like, don't care about torque or revs or horsepower. I care that they get me from here to there, and that they are safe and reliable and not going to strand me on the freeway in the middle of nowhere. Because being stranded eight hours from home is not a happy moment, especially when you are broke, unemployed, and trying to impress a potential boss with your ability to get things done.
After the Renault, we bought a Ford Tempo. Really, as I think about it, the list of car mistakes that we made were a good metaphor for the marriage itself. It started out like a cute little Pinto hatchback, went to a new car that was shiny and pretty on the outside, and had all the fancy features, but never worked right, and then went downhill from there with one problem after another. Since the divorce, I haven't needed to replace a car, and they all work like a charm. Hm. That is something to ponder, I believe.
Anyway, one second of July, the ex had left his job a few weeks previously in high dudgeon over a perceived slight. [I know, I know, you don't know what dudgeon is, but you can see the red flags flying everywhere. It was too late, that's my only excuse. I was already sunk and drowning by that time.] We traveled from Minnesota to Kansas City because he had a couple of job interviews, and it was crucial that one of them turn into a job. We had no money, but traveled down and stayed in the cheapest dive we could find, so that he would be fresh and ready the following day for the interviews.
Things went well, he felt really good about one of the opportunities, and he was pretty sure he would get the position, so we were in the mood to celebrate. We headed for Minnesota, late in the afternoon, maybe starting around 5 p.m. or so, and got about 45 minutes down the road when the trouble started.
The car died. Just died. Couldn't start it. We rolled off the road, and into a nearby, fortuitously located gas station which was happily at the bottom of the off ramp, and we put up the hood and looked inside. Yep. It was an engine. We stood there, baffled, unsure what to do, and after a few minutes, we decided the right thing was to try and start it again, because you just never know. Maybe we turned the key wrong or something. And lo and behold, it fired right off, and away we went, that sinking feeling in our stomachs replaced with one of elation. For about half an hour. When we repeated the process on the side of the freeway.
Well. This was not a good thing, and it was long before cell phones. My mother had kindly agreed to watch Adam, and was awaiting our return anxiously, I'm sure. I don't know that she was excited about babysitting, but I'm pretty sure she was ready to do anything to get us out of the house again. After about 20 minutes on the side of the freeway with the hood up, the car fired off again, and we drove to the nearest exit and pulled off and into another gas station. Where we obviously put the hood up while we cogitated on what to do.
We called my mother, collect no doubt, and explained our situation. There were no repair shops open, and we didn't have money, anyway. We were seven hours from home, it was a holiday, and it was already early evening at this point. We decided that as long as we could drive a ways before the meltdown occurred, we would head for home, and make stops along the way to let the engine cool down.
So we returned to Minnesota, half an hour at a time, stopping at every rest stop and gas station along the way to let the car rest. It was the longest drive of my life, but I have seen the entire route up close and personal now, and I am here to tell you, it's not any better up close than it is whizzing by your car windows at 70 mph. And in Iowa, you don't want to speed, let me just share with you, because they will pick you up. Although they are very nice about it when they do. Not that I would know, or anything.... :(
When we returned, twelve hours later, but all in one piece, it was to the news that the employer had already called, and so we really did have something to celebrate that holiday. But the biggest celebration I had was hugging my little boy, knowing that whatever it took, I had come home to him again, and his happy face made it all worthwhile.
So when I see people flocking to Nascar races, I have to wonder what they see in it. Because cars are just functional machines. They will never smile and give you a hug just because you came home to them.
