Yesterday I opened up the glove box of my car to look for something that, sadly, was not there. What was there, however, was the beginnings of a mouse nest that some enterprising creature had started using a handful of shredded Kleenex and a couple of pages of a small notebook. I cleared out this detritus and rearranged the contents to be less inviting from a housing standpoint. But this triggered memories of long-dead vehicles that had, at one time or another, enlivened my life.
Like the Chevy Nova that had lived out at the house for 20 years, seldom used except by generations of vermin that used it for both condo and outhouse. You did not want to be standing behind the car when it was started up for the first time after it had been idle for a while. It would start hard and with a deafening clearing of its throat, so to speak, expelling a gob of automotive phlegm composed of feces, fluff, and mortal remains.
Then there was the Volkswagen that belonged to my friend Pamela. The way you would start this machine is first you would insert the key and turn it as if you were hoping to start the car. Then you would vigorously crank the windshield wiper knob until the engine caught. This was a noisy process during which the car would shiver and jump for a while. Once during the warm-up phase, while I was sitting in the passenger seat with a good grip on the door handle, there was another noise, barely audible above the ambient splutter. Pamela got a sort of “Oh, darn, not again.” look on her face and got out of the car, went around behind and picked up the rear bumper that had fallen off during the ructions. By the time she got it reseated the car had settled down and we went on our way.
And how could I forget my grandmother's final car. My grandmother worshiped all things French. She was fulsome in her praise of Voltaire, La Creuset, Charles de Gaulle, Camembert, Christan Dior, the Impressionists, and so forth. So it was no surprise when she came home with a Citroën. The feature that made the greatest impression on her was a hydraulic lift that would cause the chassis to rise a few inches for some undisclosed purpose. She would demonstrate this miracle for anybody who might drift into the aura of this extraordinary engineering achievement.
What she did with this car was wander around the neighborhood on short errands of one sort or another. Sometimes she would pick up her friends to go to the book club, say, or an art gallery. When this happened in the winter there were frequent complaints about the heater which my grandmother would rebuff by assurances that this was a very fine heater which just took a while to warm up. Her friends learned to wear earmuffs after thanksgiving. Then came the day, some years into its life, when her son borrowed it for a trip that was long and cold enough to take the measure of this Gallic accessory. When he arrived at his destination, teeth chattering and ears nearly frostbit, he took it into a garage where it was revealed that the thing did not even have a heater.
Some years after this I myself had the chance to drive this fine machine when I was visiting my grandmother at her summer house on Cape Cod. My plan was to drive down to visit a friend about a half an hour away down the Mid-Cape Highway which, in those distant times, fell far short of the flawless pavement which later drew tourists at Mach speed from points south to Provincetown. It took some serious wheedling to get her permission, along with detailed instructions on driving techniques, identification of equipment, such as the clutch and gearshift, and of course the all-important hydraulic lift, and finally I drove away leaving my grandmother wringing her hands on the porch.
It was an uneventful drive down jouncing over and through the potholes, frost heaves, cracks, and slumps of the Mid-Cape Highway of the sixties. By the time I started back it was dark. It took me a while to figure out how to turn on the headlights since the cabin light didn't reach to the area of interest, but I got it in the end and set off. All of the light controls were on one appendage to the steering column: headlights, cabin lights, turn signals. I had barely cleared my friend's driveway before I discovered that the lighting appendage was perilously loose in its moorings and every slight perturbation caused it to change it's settings from off to on, high beam to low beam, left to right, even the cabin light flicked on and/or off from time to time.. And so I made my way up the Mid-Cape Highway flashing and sparkling like the Tree from Christmas Past, the kaleidoscope changing at every jounce, driving sometimes by the light of the left turn signal alone, sometimes by all available beacons. I can only guess what the oncoming traffic thought. Some pulled over, and who could blame them?
I couldn't see the point of mentioning this to my grandmother, as she would have had to think of some reason why this was a brilliant engineering accomplishment, but my uncle understood.
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