Come Friday night and a silver behemoth of a four-wheel drive arrives on our doorstep. DD is having so much fun playing with his precious new toy, fiddling with the air-con and the power windows and the steering-wheel volume control of the CD player – though I admit I’m not averse to a bit fussing myself. And what a precious new toy it is to DD; he instructs me to manually feed the seatbelt back after I’ve taken it off so as not to scratch the interior. He also insists on MD spotting for him when backing out of the garage at night and drives at about 2km an hour through the back lane to stop the perfectly harmless branches from sullying the pristine top coat of paint. He’s always complaining how as an automatic it doesn’t handle as well as the old car, but you can tell he’s enjoying not being vehicle-bullied by all the other nicer cars on the road.

Yesterday I had my last ride in the old bomb before we sent it off to car shop. As I stared into the grape juice stains in the back of the front passenger seat from the time we drove around Tasmania it struck me for the first time that we were really going to get rid of the car we had had for the last ten years. Most likely it’s a screwed up product of our society’s consumer-driven emphasis on the value of material goods, but I suddenly realised that I had grown a funny sort of sentimental attachment to the old bomb. In a twisted way, the little white sedan had become a part and protagonist of our family history.

In its long-suffering lifetime after it had fallen into our hands, the bomb has trailed along (or rather, carried us) faithfully through all matters of strange events and borne all our peculiar idiosyncrasies with nary a protest. It has become an embodiment of the making-it-good-in-the-big-bad-world psyche of my folks from its baptism of fire of sorts when some random dickhead rammed into its side because he thought we were uninsured to when another random dickhead drove his motorcycle into the front door. All the road trips we’ve had – dodgy Soviet-era choral pieces which was about the only music DD allowed in the car, roadside naps after hours of driving, and when I was younger how MD used to squash up in the back with me to play hangman and snap. DD’s lengthy and tedious demonstrations of how to slowly come to a stop before a set of traffic lights so as not to prematurely kill the brakes. The way every time we went to the market I had to spend the ride home with vegies sharing the backseat and a bag of bananas in my lap because there just wasn’t enough room in the back. Eating ice cream out the door on hot summer days because DD didn’t trust me not to drip all over the interior. Philosophical conversations while going down the freeway at 90k per hour and all four windows completely wound down.

All of the sudden, I didn’t quite mind so much the sitting behind the driver’s seat with my knees up to my chest, or the funny smell in particular places in the back, or the way anything left in there over the weekend went mysteriously missing, or the fact that the windscreen wipers had a blind spot smack bang in the middle of the driver’s line of vision. Sure it was a bomb, but it was a damn good bomb that had miraculously survived ten years of my oddball family and me.

I’m going to miss our little white sedan.

0Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home