Oh What a Feeling

I'm coming to learn that I do not deal well with loss.

Back towards the end of July, while awkwardly -- as always -- parallel parking my Toyota around the corner from my house, I saw a puff -- not more than that really -- of white smoke coming from under the hood. I Googled "white smoke car engine" and none of the results were comforting. The next day my mechanic confirmed my worst fears: the head gasket had blown. "Mr. Aaron," he said , "I think this is the end of the car." Pure poetry, that.

You'll note that this post appears in September. For more than the complete month of August, my car sat where I'd parked it after the drive back from the shop. After a few weeks of further neglect, it wouldn't start. I emptied it of personal effects, and claimed I would see about how to relieve myself of the car sometime in the perpetual "next few days".

Probably not more than a couple weeks before the engine sent it's smoke signal, I had lost a kitten - the runt of a brood of alley kittens raised in my backyard. I've had - and still have - other cats, but I'd not owned a kitten in my adulthood, and I'd never felt so...responsible for something before. He was sick more than he was well, and he was well only often enough so that I knew -- by virtue of the stark contrast -- just how sick he was when he was sick. He was a fighter -- in a kittenish way, of course -- but he ran out of fight just as I ran out of money.

I've lost dearly loved relatives, and my best friend through my school years, but I don't remember ever balling like I did when I had to take that scrawny kitten in to the vet and not bring him back. I think I actually experienced most of the stages of grief that you always hear about. Even the next day, I was in a concert hall when a fellow sang Cole Porter's "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye". Not such that I caused a scene, but I was breaking up inside.

So, though I was recovering, I wasn't really ready to let anyone -- or as it turns out, anything -- go again for a long time.

And so the car sat there.

This morning, it was towed. It will be sold at auction -- or something like that -- and some parts will probably be stripped to keep someone else's junker going a little longer, and then some amount of the proceeds will go to charity (an animal shelter, naturally), and then I'll get a wee bit back come tax time. But even knowing all of that -- and, yes, recognizing that, after all, the car doesn't feel a thing -- immediately upon seeing the old thing off, I drove my wife's car into work this morning with moist eyes.

I don't want to make too much of my feelings for that car. After all, this seems to be the summer of me weeping at the drop of a hat. I can't say that I've really given a squat one way or the other for Ted Kennedy before, but I found myself touched by many of the speakers I heard on TV at his various and sundry memorial services. That dude who sang "Love Changes Everything"? Totally had me.

And there's a part of me that feels guilty about grieving the loss of a hunk of metal with a broken cassette deck. I mean, people have cancer; people are losing their homes; people's spouses are dying in Afghanistan. It's a car (or a kitten), be a friggin' man, for crying out loud.

All the same, I'd like to say a few words about the car.

Its check engine light started coming almost exactly four years ago, Labor Day weekend of 2005. I heeded the first couple of warnings, but after some expensive repairs settled into a three-and-a-half-year game of chicken with the light. Perhaps the light won, but I fought the good fight.

Maybe two or three days after I bought the car, I was reaching towards the back floorboard to throw out a banana peel -- I don't know that it was ever routine, but I know I haven't eaten bananas in the car since -- when I smacked into the vehicle ahead of me. I think it was a pickup or something similarly riding higher off the ground, because the other vehicle suffered no damage, while my hood crumpled like late-Christmas-morning gift wrap. I hadn't built up any emotional attachment to the car yet, so didn't feel bad, you know, for the car, as such. But God I was embarrassed. Embarrassed, though, and insured!

I believe it was a Willie Nelson and Leon Russell cassette that finished off the cassette deck. It had always played tapes a hair fast anyway. Not all Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks, but just sped up enough that when you heard the same song on the radio it felt like it dragged a little.

The AC broke probably all the back in 2001 or so, maybe just over a year after I'd bought it. I lived in New York state at the time, and it just didn't get all that hot, so after a rather breathtaking repair estimate, I didn't bother to get it fixed. By the time I moved to Maryland, where the broken AC was more of an issue, I figured the car had depreciated to the point that it wouldn't be worth the repair. During those days when my workday began at 1:00pm, and I would ride to work with open car windows barely making a dent in the heat, I got in the habit of bringing a change of clothes, or, failing that, going topless in the staff restroom and holding my sweat-soaked shirts under the hand dryer. One has to push that button at least a good three times to make a nice dress shirt presentable.

Against my wife's better judgment, we took the Toyota when we made our December trip southward to see family last year. I'd gotten it ready with a tune-up, an oil change, and two "new" used tires to replace the most worn pair. The trip went off without a hitch, and, on our way back, we chugged up to Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. We stopped at just about every scenic overlook on the portion of the route we'd settled on traveling. I think I actually gasped at the beauty of some of the vistas. Even when we got grandeur-fatigue, we at least pulled over at each overlook, though finally staying in the car for the last few.

When we were done, I remember a nice, slow, winding descent from the heights, coasting mainly, a little proud of the old car that had gotten us up there and that would soon get us back to our lives. I'm under no illusion that the Toyota will be in Heaven soon, but that day it got close enough.