lectio difficilior: i'm taking my lemons . . .

My life has been full of terrible misfortunes most of which never happened.
--Michel de Montaigne

As mentioned in a previous post, I recently made the brave decision to purchase a car, a white 1991 Volvo 240. Brave, I say, because I haven't had the best luck with cars in the past, to understate the case. I refer you most recently to the case of Nausikaa. And before that, there was the boosted Oldsmo-buick (TM seth). And these are just the most egregious examples of my car-tastrophes.

My first car was a grey 1981 Honda Accord, the car on which I learned to drive stick shift. My dad would take me on the Southwest Freeway in Houston in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday mornings so that I could experience switching between all five gears. I listened to mix tapes made for me by my first love in that car. During my junior and senior years at St. John's, each morning I picked up the Bick twins in that car. Yet all these idyllic memories came crashing to a halt one morning when the car did. In 1997 I was living in Monteverde, Costa Rica, and my brother totalled my precious vehicle. My mom remarked that for first time since I left she was happy that a good half-continent separated my brother and me.

After a year interregnum came the grey 1985 Nissan Maxima, a hand-me-down from my aunt. This car was, when purchased, quite the fancy ride: leather seats and a state of the art electrical system, as part of which an excessively perky woman's voice would, for instance, inform you if a door had not been properly shut. By the time the car got to me, however, some of the wires had gotten crossed, because the woman began to lie. I would be driving on the highway and all of the sudden hear, "The trunk is open." Panicking, I would pull off to the side of the road only to discover that no such thing was the case. Plus, the transmission featured quite possibly the most annoying problem ever to plague a moving vehicle. At speeds faster than 55 mph, any deceleration caused the engine to jump into third gear and stay there until the car came to a complete stop; so if I had to use the brake at all while on an interstate (a not-unheard-of occurrence), I would inevitably also have to (again) pull off to the emergency lane, stop, and then accelerate again. Annoying, and very unsafe.

Then there was the 1986 Buick LeSabre (a.k.a. the Oldsmo-buick), a hand-me-down from my grandparents, jacked by the youthful cretin in Austin and when returned, driven into the ground by my brother until his fancy new engineering job allowed him to trade up for a black 2003 P.T. Cruiser. And before Nausikaa was exposed to the cruel realities of the big, bad District of Columbia, she was improbably burgled on the insular St. Mary's School campus. Despite 24-hour security, Nausikaa had the dubious distinction of being the only car-sualty (I really need to stop with these awful puns!) during my three years there when her front passenger-side window was broken and her CD/radio faceplate was stolen.

And now there is Fenno, named for a character in Julia Glass's 2002 novel Three Junes, which I was reading at the time I bought the car. A gay Scot living in New York, Fenno owns a bookstore and learns to be a caregiver for his dying neighbor and his own dysfunctional family. In naming it, I decided that I needed a car that would take care of me. And I plan to return the favor, as I recently purchased a club.

Fenno has already experienced his own travails, failing the incredibly exacting Virginia state inspection twice already. After the first go-round, I had three different mechanics in Raleigh look at him, all of which declared him in great shape but in need of some fine tuning. A thousand dollars later, however, and I was in no mood for "fine tuning," so I held my breath and submitted him for inspection again. This time, a tiny bulb (the reverse light) proved to the catch. And according to my Arlington-area mechanics, only a $150 diagnostic test could possibly unravel the mysteries of the electrical system. So I thanked them for never touching my car again and collected poor, disgraced Fenno, assuring him that this was not his fault. My officemate, an avid conspiracy theorist, blames the boondoggle of the state inspection system, while my mother believes I could sort it all out if I would just take a man along with me (her theory being that "mechanics are sexist"). I prefer to handle the situation in my own, inimitable way. I am formulating a plan, which currently consists of sitting around and wishing the problem would go away, since I have no money to do anything else. So stay turned for the further adventures of me and Fenno!