When we last left our hero, he was about to leave for Maryland with his beloved friend. He had four papers to write and little in the way of prospects for getting it done. Visiting relatives is a bad time to have backlogged homework. Well folks, it doesn’t get any happier for our proud commando.
Saturday morning we packed up and left the station by about 7:30. It all looked well. We actually got four college students and their bags into one Chevy Plymouth Sundance. It was Valerie (er… Constance) and I, plus two friends for whom we were giving a ride to Richmond. Of our two backseat companions, Gladys was going to somewhere on the North Side of DC (her mom was picking her up and taking her the rest of the way), and Lynn, an Irish (that is, an exchange student from North Ireland) was picking up a bus ticket and going to who knows where. We got to Richmond around 11:30 and dropped off Gladys and tracked down the greyhound bus station for Lynn. By 12:45 we were visiting some friends of Valerie’s for lunch. The family was that of Jon and Kris Hinley. Jon was the former Music director at Valerie’s old church in Knoxville. They had moved into their new house all of two weeks ago and were glad to have an old friend and her strange boyfriend to lunch. We made nice soft noises about their new home and their two adopted children (at least, I think they were adopted—they had dark skin and curly hair and Jon and Kris are both white and ) and headed off for Hollywood, MD. Little did we know that Doom was about to descend upon us.
That’s right I said Doom. With a capital “D.” When we got back into the car, it started making some funny noises. Well, only one funny noise. It sounded like there was an extra motor going on in sync with the engine. We would accelerate, the engine would go “RRrrrr!” and the other sound would go “Wwrrre!” Right along with it. Now, unless you don’t know, half way through an 8 hour trip is a bad time for college students to have car trouble. There wasn’t really much we could do about it. With much consideration, we decided to drive on (I mean, our options were?) and have somebody look at it before we came back. Unfortunately, it was not to be. We got just on the other side of Richmond when the car went “Wwrrre ya hahahaha!!!!” and decided to permanently stay in first gear. I wasn’t happy.
We pulled over. We prayed. I prayed for everything from cheap car service to supernatural automobile repairs to instantaneous transportation. Valerie started the car again and managed to get it all the way up to 30… in first gear.
A quick recap: It’s now 2:30. We’re in Richmond, VA. We have a broken car. This is not the miracle dispensation of time I had been praying for. We pulled into the nearest shopping center we could find and into the parking lot of a local jiffy lube type place. They were very nice. They couldn’t work on our car, but they did lend us use of their phone for about an hour and a half. We called everybody. We called Valerie’s parents, we called her uncle (that we were going to visit), we called the family that we had just been visiting. We called all these people over again. Ok, so Valerie called them all and I just looked helpful and got important documents from the car. But I looked really helpful! So here’s what ended up happening: Anybody want to guess how many mechanics are open on the Saturday before Thanksgiving? That would be about right. Zero. We were pretty much stuck till Monday. However, the nice people at the generic Jiffy did recommend a place just up the street which was so close that we wouldn’t need to find a tow truck. The Hinley’s decided they just hadn’t gotten enough to see of us, so they invited us to stay with them until Monday. After we got the car looked at and made our decisions about what was to be done, Valerie’s uncle John would come pick us up and take us up to Hollywood (MD, that is). So we impinged on (what were to me) strangers for a weekend, visited a strange church that Sunday, I got all my reading done, and we were back at the generic Jiffy come Monday. We drove the car to the mechanics, had them look at it, wend to McDonald’s for breakfast, and came back for the diagnosis.
Wanna guess what it was? Oh come on, you’d never believe. No really. Fine. We needed a new transmission. But, relatively speaking, it was good. They found a salvage yard that was willing to sell one for only $500. With parts and service it was estimated coming to $950. We had heard warnings from friends, family and random acquaintances upward of $1200. And the phone calls again. Valerie called her parents; I called my parents; Valerie called her parents again; Valerie called her uncle for a ride; Valerie called her parents again (she kept getting a busy signal). She tried calling her parents for a straight 45 minutes. Apparently the phone was off the hook. We made the decision to repair without them. The other option was that somebody had an 11 year old car they were willing to sell for $500. But it was ugly and we were scared. It just so happens (thanks be to God) that Valerie is a pinchpenny. She opens up these accounts, puts money in them, moves and opens up a new account, and completely forgets that she ever had the old account. This is a good thing because when some emergency comes up, she suddenly remembers that she’s been saving up for years for just such a time as this. If it had been my car, I would have sold it (wait… I did sell my car under similar circumstances). She was upset about it, but now that it’s all over with, I think she still has more money than me. Probably always will. I think I must somehow devise a way to claim access to all her assets… hmm… mwahahaha!
I could go on. I could tell you of the contrasts between staying under duress with a mild-mannered suburban couple, who had matching towels for their children, and staying by invitation with a wild gregarious couple out in the countryside, who both had masters in computer science and a total of maybe 10 computers in their house. I could tell you of the generosity of people lending their cars and how many times we used that car to drive across Richmond. I could tell you lots of stuff. But I can tell you’re already getting bored. Suffice it to say that we picked up the car today. It runs fine. We carpooled all the way back to Hollywood.
Now it’s Wednesday, and I still have four papers to write. I’ll be getting on now…
neumatikos 