The Old Girl & The New One

A hard thing it is to trade in your ride.  My old girl! She was the best of cars, she was the worst of cars.  In her youth how wondrous she was! The way she would slide her rear doors open at the touch of a button! The way she would slide them shut that way too!In her youth how wondrous was her hatchback that opened and shut the same way! Touch the icon and  - whirrr! - she was open and ready to load.  Touch it again, hear  another whirrr and the great door shut as tight as a mobster’s lips.She did everything for me:

• Told me what direction I was driving in.
• Told me what the outside temperature was.
• Told me how much farther I could go with the amount of gas in her tank.

And then there were those Stow ‘n Go seats, which no one but Chrysler has been able to come near to. You want to take six people to the movies? They’ll all fit, no problem.  You then want to carry a giant desk and a six- foot bookcase from your house to the apartment of one of your kids? Tug here, touch there and the seats kneel right down like trained circus animals and then – more magic! - disappear under the floorboards!Added to all this, she was lipstick-red with pale grey seats of leather. She was the best deal they had for me when I was looking so she was the car I bought back in spring of 2005.But…. Eventually…. Time began having its way with her. Four years in, her doors began flying back open after you had closed them. They would nearly shut and then – whoosh! pop back open again, sometimes well after you’d walked away from her. Many’s the time I came out of some store to find her whole interior laid open as if under the surgeon’s knife. I began to worry that squirrels would set up a condo association inside her.And so it happened that last month I went to look for her replacement, as different from the old red lady as she could be.This new girl is Midnight Blue. Her seats are made of a humble cloth fuzz instead of leather.

• She won’t open or close her doors at the touch of a button. She likes to see you bring a little effort of your own to the task.
• She won't slide her seats forward and back at a button’s touch. You want the seat closer, you reach under for the metal bar and heave yourself forward, the way we all had to do in the old days.
• Unlike her sister, she won’t tell you what direction you’re driving in.
• She’s mute when it comes to the outside temperature.
• She won’t even tell you it’s time to look for a gas station. If you’re such a dope that you let your tank run clear down to droplets ‘til you stall, well, she figures, let that be a lesson to you.

And the funny thing is, I really like all this, in part because with fancy features come fancy glitches.Also, she fits what I see as the emerging spirit of the age. “Simplify!” said Henry Thoreau and I am  doing that now with my new car that cost  a full $5,000 less than her predecessor did almost eight years back.But! I should add that she is a Chrysler minivan as well and so has those fabulous seats, whose magic-circus trick can go on for years making my kids kneel down, in gratitude, for all that dandy, custom-delivered furniture. :-)

A Busy Mom's Best Friend

It’s amazing what you can do in a car. Parents in the 1920s almost lost their minds worrying what the young people were doing in their cars, these rolling parlors they could get in and go just anywhere, get themselves just anywhere, as far as they liked if they had gas enough .But I’m not talking about THOSE kinds of activities.I’m talking about the myriad other ways your car comes in handy, especially if it’s a minivan.In my book the minivan is the nest invention since the blow-dryer. The pencil sharpener. The clothes drier even.And I’m serious. I got my first Dodge caravan in 1986. It was red, like three-quarters of Nancy Reagan’s wardrobe. When it died in seven years’ time I got a white one. Then a green one. Then another red one and I’m here to tell you my lords it over the cars of every other car out there, be it Honda or Subaru, Toyota or big old Caddy.The Chrysler is the only minivan with the Stow-and-Go seats, these plush comfy thrones that at the push of  a button fold up and sink away under the floorboards, yielding me a ballroom of space. Then another touch and up they come again like a band of jolly ghosts appearing  once again at the dinner table.Look at all the room!In this space I can and have toted swoony big palm trees, dining room chairs past counting, whole dining room tables, or as I did yesterday, a seven foot long buffet. I have stretched out for a nap, soothed travelling cats, cages and all, and now apparently refinished furniture. (Just as a note the furniture refinishing I did in my car Sunday and Monday didn’t involve any 5F5 which you wouldn’t use in a small enclosed place of course, unless you wanted to keel over  dead within ten minutes. It was just a little subtle steel wool-and-rubbing agents that I know about as someone who has been rehabbing furniture since before Nancy Reagan was First Lady of California, speaking of that slim the giant-headed clothes horse who went to my college but didn’t finish, just like Fellow Republican Barbara Bush did with her pearly dog-collar and her salty talk. (Did you know she is famous for sketchy? I didn’t know that I until I read that thinly disguised 2008 fictionalization of Laura Bush. Which I read. In my car. In stolen moments in various grocery store parking lots.))Here they are the two of them, Miz Pearls first  and Nancy below her.Well here’s the beauty of a blog: you can just go on and on spooling out stories and nobody fires you or gets out the red pencil. even. Everyone in my family of origin could do this, speaking of ghosts at the table. There were four grownups at my dining room table growing up and any one of them could talk tile the cows came home. Once my 90-year-old great aunt fell asleep during one of these talkathons and fell clean out of her chair and onto the floor.Anyway the Chrysler Plymouth people have a wonderful car in the minivan. Mine is now eight years old and I can hardly wait to get the new model. In the 2013 Chrysler I’m hoping to set up a small bowling alley. :-)