Now I Understand
By the time I understood what my car had been trying to tell me, it was long gone, parked and awaiting dismantling at the H&H Salvage Yard.
First there had been the loss of my one ignition key, which I can’t blame on my former car. I don’t think it, or she, had the power to cause me to somehow drop my set of keys on the dog trail near my former house where they rested, forlorn and unknown, for 2 1/2 weeks. But I am not in a position to resist magical thinking. I have spent lots of days, 57 to be exact, alone in a friend’s upstairs bedroom, thinking about what I could have done differently.
My wife also often sits alone, presumably, in the living room of my former house, and watches movies on her phone. She’s the one I could have done differently. But you know how that goes: You can’t go back in time, can you? I’ve certainly tried, but must make do with doing so only in my mind.
Once the keys were recovered by the mower of the dog trail and set on a bench for me to find, I found I could start my Volvo, but only sometimes. Other times the key wouldn’t turn. I know now I should have inserted the key more gently, and maybe used some lubricant. She’s an old gal, and it just takes a bit more coaxing. Once it’s in, she advised the only way she knew how, then you have a chance to, patiently, get her going.
The frustrating thing is, I knew this instinctively, and through experience, but grew too complacent to keep applying this thing I’d learned.
Then, one sunny day while driving to the pickleball courts, I engaged the windshield cleaner and found the wipers, once having wiped, refused to stop wiping. What was it that she was saying? Well, it’s so obvious now that the message was to wipe away old grime, if you will, and treat each day as a blank slate. You see, it leaves you with more possibilities. This isn’t rocket science. I don’t think it’s even any kind of science.
But I wasn’t getting it. I attribute it to hubris. Instead of understanding and applying, I found the fuse that powered my wipers and yanked it out. Whenever it rained, I reinserted it. Gently. The wipers wiped.
At the time I remember wondering if my car was possessed. That thought was on the right track, but when we think of possession, we assume it comes from an evil source, right?
As it seemed anything could happen at any time with this car, its utilitarian existence was suddenly imbued with mystery. That too was a gentle suggestion. I had become too known, too predictable to my lover. I needed to use whatever mystery I could scare up out of me. I wonder now if the Esther Perel book I’d listened to on compact disc in the Volvo had had an influence on the car. It certainly hadn’t had any on me.
I was driving to Jim Thorpe with my cousin when I noticed the speedometer read 10 miles per hour and the gauge indicated we were out of gas. The temperature read the engine was at its hottest, about to burst into flames, in fact. I’d just gassed up in Lehighton and had just passed a pickup truck in a 50-mph zone. It hit me then that speed, heat and energy levels are a matter of interpretation. Some see the tank as half-full, while for others speed is merely a state of mind.
When, one day at my friend John’s, the car’s shifter refused to move from Park, I tried forcing it. Immediately the wipers came on. Then a Bruce Cockburn song, “Mango in the Garden,” began to blare from its speakers. Instead of letting its sensual message reach me, I turned down the volume, which somehow made the song louder.
That was when something in me broke, or at least bent horribly. I curled up into a kind of human ball, eventually unballing myself and calling a towing company. Five hours later (during which John and I watched a few Star Trek episodes), a tower showed up and took my car away.
Now it sits at the salvage yard. Probably pissed, or at least disappointed as hell in me.
I know how it feels. How could I have been so unreceptive? Instead of my own personal safety, I should have been thinking of how to repair my marriage and perpetually court my wife.
But maybe it’s not too late, I thought only an hour ago. I took an Uber to the salvage yard, and that’s where I stand, peering through a fence at 9:40 on a Thursday night.
Do I just stand here and wait for my car — well, technically my ex-car — to signal to me? Do I call out for it? Did I ever name it? I guess I was remiss even at that. What would I do if I found it? Drive it right through this razor-wired fence? Not exactly the exhibition of patience the Volvo seems to advocate.
I decide to scale the fence and figure out the razor wire once I get there. Once I get there, I look around for options. I hear a double-tap on a horn, look down, and see my Volvo waiting for me on the same side of the fence. Before I begin to contemplate how that was possible, I see the driver’s side door open, presumably for me. My former car is nothing if not polite.
Once I’m in the car, it pulls itself onto the highway and heads back to town. I’m too intrigued by the situation to try to intervene. Music comes on, and it’s Freddy Fender singing “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.” I wonder if my car prefers singers with names that are also car parts. Window cleaner spurts from the wipers, which swoosh back and forth to the beat of the song.
We finally end up at the pickleball courts where I play with my pickleball friends every Wednesday — pickleball day. The Volvo stops in a parking space. We face the courts. “Uh huh,” I say. “Something about pickles?” The engine revs and the nose of the car seems to shake its head “no.”
“Courts? Court? She’s gonna take me to court?” The wipers begin wiping. It means for me to try again. “Do I have to…court her?”
The horn blares, but in a kind of “TA-DAAAA!” fashion. I had gotten it right: “Marriage works best when the participants actively court each other?”
Unfortunately, the pickleball players all turn and face us, annoyed we’ve disrupted their matches. I have to admit I’d feel the same way. I mean, what’s this guy in the weird car doing, anyway? That’s what I imagine them asking.
“Now I understand what you tried to say to me,” I say to my car. “How you suffered for our sanity. How you tried to set us free.”
I pull out my cell phone and call my wife. “Hello,” answers Andee in her non-committal way, her voice booming out of the sound system.
“Hey there, sexy,” I answer. “Um, so, what are you wearing?” Suddenly, industrial metal music booms from the car’s speakers, drowning us out. Someone who sounds like a drunken Cookie Monster “sings” about total destruction of the planet, presumably Earth.
The Volvo peels out from the pickleball complex, drives down the highway, turns onto a mountain road, reaches the mountaintop, then the edge of a cliff and drives off it. In midair, I worry my family and pickleball partners will regard this as a suicide. It isn’t. Tell them: My car killed me.
