Bad news.
I just got off the phone with the service center. I took the family truckster in earlier today for a realignment and a diagnostic check. The "Check Engine" light has been turning on and off at irregular intervals over the past two weeks, which both scares me and annoys the bejabbers out of me at the same time. It scares me because I'm convinced that any minute my car will blow up, and it annoys the bejabbers out of me because I can't ignore it. I remember the good old days, when cars were cars and not rolling computers, and I could handle any incipient malfunction by turning the radio up louder and ignoring whatever sounds of impending doom were emanating from the engine block. But now we have "Check Engine" lights, so I duly took the engine to be checked. The service center guy said a bunch of things I don't understand, and then he said "twelve hundred dollars," which I understand all too well, and then I went and got Warren on the phone. Apparently my catalytic converter is converting into a catatonic converter and we will eventually have to do something about it. Sigh.
It amazes me how I have taken the $1200 figure in stride. There was a time when the thought of sinking $1200 into a car would have put me on the floor. I don't think I spent $1200 on purchasing and repairing my first car in total. Man, I miss that car! It was a 1978 Ford Fiesta - remember those? Nah, of course not. The Fiesta was Ford's knockoff of the VW Rabbit, a feeble attempt to capture a slice of the economy car market. It did get great gas mileage, mostly because it didn't take much gas to wind up the rubber bands that ran the thing. The car couldn't go above 50 mph unless I was traveling downhill with a stiff breeze behind me, but if you need to drive faster than that, you should have left home earlier anyway.
The Fiesta was already a used car when it became part of our family in the early 80's. It was bought off a family friend as a stopgap measure until my dad could get the car he really wanted, but then my sister went off to college, and I went off to college, and the car kept running, so what the hey. Plus it was a stylin' ride - bright orange inside and out - and when we loaded our two large black dogs in the back, it looked like a mobile Halloween display, and what could top that? I purchased it for the princely sum of $1 in 1990 and I soon came to appreciate its many amenities. It was one of the first cars to come equipped with outside weather sensors: If your feet got wet, it was raining. If they were cold, it was winter. It had 2/40 air conditioning (2 windows down, 40 miles per hour). Best of all, it had these little, skinny inside door latches that frequently broke off, which meant I had to roll down the window and open the door from the outside or try to scootch over the stick shift and across the passenger seat to get out. I dare any Hummer-driving troglodyte to make a more memorable arrival than that!
One of the hazards of driving an older, more obscure car is trying to obtain quality care. While I don't normally enjoy dealing with car maintenance, the Fiesta was a snap. I simply tootled back to my parents' house and my parents and I would ferry the car down to Rudy's Gararge, after which I would partake of all the amenities of home such as free food and washing machine access that one so sorely misses in one's early 20's. I had full confidence in Rudy, mostly because he had been repairing cars since approximately the beginning of time. In fact, one of the cave paintings in Lascaux is actually a message from Rudy's Garage. (Rudy called. The wheel is ready for pickup, any time after the equinox. Oh, and we need more woolly mammoth hides for the baby.) Rudy's encyclopedic knowledge of the internal combustion engine came in quite handy. He didn't need any dang computer chip to tell HIM what was wrong, nossir.
Another hazard of owning the Fiesta was finding the bits and pieces necessary to keep it going. By the time I took ownership, the car was so old, and its presence so rare, that only the regional distributor could acquire replacement parts. After Rudy got a gander at the ole Fiesta's latest issue, he'd call me in to give me the bad news. Rudy didn't care for his store-boughten teeth and rarely wore them, which rendered his speech fairly unintelligible. He would wax eloquent on my arthritic car's newest problem for a good quarter-hour, at the end of which he would invariably conclude, "Going to have to send off to South Paris for that part, dear," which was rendered as, "Gonna hafta shendof t'Sowf Pahis for that paahht, deah." During this time all I had to do was throw in the occasional "okay" or "uh-huh". As soon as I heard his traditional concluding statement, I would nod gravely and ask, "How long do you think that will take?"
"Two weeks, deah," was the inevitable answer. This fortnight's pause always intrigued me. Why two weeks? Did Ripley and Fletcher have to call Detroit and have the part custom-made from antique molds? Did Ford have to dig into its secret cache of archived parts deep in the bowels of the earth to find my accelerator pedal cable? Did you even know accelerator pedals have cables? I sure didn't, until mine broke on the Fiesta and it took two weeks to find a new one!
Alas, the time came to pass when the parts that failed got bigger and more important (like cooling systems), and the ability to find them even in salvage yards diminished precipitously. The Fiesta became a friend's ice-driving car, and then a chicken coop. I imagine it's now probably rusting away quietly in a field, creating an eyesore, if not a Superfund-eligible environmental hazard. I went off and bought a Honda Civic that had inside door latches that didn't break and no big rust holes in the floor, which I kept for ten years before selling it to a student of mine so I could buy another car off my father, and then I got married and got a family truckster. Now when I get a call from the garage I can understand every word the service guy is saying, even if I don't comprehend what he means, and he never concludes by saying he's got to send off to South Paris for that paht, deah, and now car ownership isn't nearly as fun as it was.
