My Little Car

So Dave drove himself to work on Friday. He claimed that I was "more passed out than usual," so he let me sleep. As is typical on days when he does that, I woke up about 15 minutes after he had left. Friday was beautiful. I had some Oktoberfest work to do – as usual, but then wanted to run some errands. Which means I had to take my Geo Metro.

The Metro (aka little car, Wagenschen) has been parked on the street since the first week of August. It was covered with a fine sheen of tree sap and decorated with leaves and cobwebs. It wasn't very hot inside the car, which is good since the only downside to my little car is that the air conditioning died a couple of years ago. I would get it fixed – if it weren't the compressor that needs fixing. I think the cost of a new compressor is somewhere around the Blue Book value of the whole car.

As I drove my little car around I was reminded how great a car it really is. This car and I have spent a lot of time together. I bought it in September 1996 when Dave was leaving Champaign for the big city to work – and taking his 1993 Geo Metro with him. [Note: My Geo Metro is not as little as his was – mine has 4 cylinders, his had 3.]

After several bad car shopping trip experiences, I headed 20 minutes north of Urbana to Rantoul to look for a car at Rogers in Rantoul. Their main business was trucks, but they had a selection of regular cars made by Chevy and Pontiac. Our salesperson was a woman. The second time we were there she let us take a Geo Metro "sedan" out for a test drive by ourselves (lots of people were at the dealership buying trucks). Dave had gotten information from the credit union about what price the car should be – what the dealership probably paid, what price they would shoot for, what price we should be able to get, etc. We then calculated that out to monthly payments after figuring my college graduate and first-time buyer incentives. We were ready.

We sat down with Brenda fully prepared. We talked about the picture of her kids' heads poking through a large corn cob painted on a piece of plywood at the Sweet Corn Festival in Hoopestown (pronounced "huhpsten," not "hoopsten"). We were familiar with the photo op from our own visit to the Sweet Corn Festival that year with our friend Chris Wonders. I was not able to convince those guys to have our picture taken amid the corn kernels.

Brenda wrote down the price they were offering on a piece of paper along with what the monthly payment would be. She handed it to me (Dave was being nice and continuing to allow me to think that I was doing this all by myself.) I handed it to Dave. Brenda noticed the look we gave each other and said she would be happy to give us a chance to talk about it. She left us alone. Dave got out his notes, I grabbed the calculator. How could this be? Her first offer was lower than the number we were going to try to get her down to?!

We went through the math. Everything seemed correct. Brenda came back and we all shook hands. Because I was buying a 1996 car at the end of the 1996 model year, they didn't have what I wanted on the lot. They were going to trade for it. So, I had to give Brenda the specifics on what I wanted – or really, what I did not want. We agreed on the purchase of a 1996 Geo Metro "three door" hatch with automatic transmission, a/c, stereo/cassette, and "cargo cover" for the tiny space behind the back seat visible through the back window, and rear defrost. I gave her my top choice for color: silver sage metallic, and a list of colors I couldn't do: super black, cool white, super grape. We finalized the list. She told me it could take between seven and ten days to find the car, make the trade, and get the car delivered. Though I was let down after writing a big check and not getting a car, I was excited about finally being close to having my very own new car.

Around the time that I was car shopping, Saturn was running a commercial that featured a young woman with brown, shoulder-length hair who was buying her first new car. The first time I saw it I almost cried. The salesman gathered the people in the dealership around to announce that this woman had just bought her first new car. The camera zooms in on the new car keys dangling from his hand just as you see her shaking, nervous hand grasp them from him. How exciting!

About four days after I signed the initial paperwork, Dave and I were at home making lemon chicken at about 6:30. The chicken chunks were about half-cooked and awaiting their lemon bath when the phone rang. It was Brenda at Rogers in Rantoul. She said they had made the trade, got all of my first choices, and that the car had just pulled up. All they had to do was clean it and put their name on it and I could have it! She asked if I wanted to come up and get it that night. I looked at Dave – he said he would be willing to dump dinner and go! I looked at the clock. It would take us 20 minutes to get there and the dealership closed at 7:00. I told Brenda it would be just before 7:00 when we go there. She said that was no problem – she and her manager would stick around so I could take delivery.

She and her manager were going to stay late to finish the paperwork on a car that cost as much the tires and bed lining on their pickup trucks?! Dave and I turned off the stove and jumped in his Metro. When we got to the dealership, I couldn't see the car. Brenda said they were finishing the cleaning after its drive from Kentucky. We did the paperwork with Brenda and her manager in her manager's office. He was a very nice guy in a very bad green suit. After everything was signed, we walked back out to the showroom floor. And there it was. My new car.

Rogers in Rantoul has a red carpet that leads from the middle of the showroom to a big glass door that opens to let cars in and out. The pavement outside the glass door is painted red also. You drive out on the red carpet into downtown Rantoul. Before I left, Brenda apologized that it didn't have a full tank of gas. The garage guys had already left and couldn't take it over to the gas station that they used to fill it up. She handed me an envelope and explained that her manager had given her ten dollars to give me to fill it up (ten dollars was more than enough to fill my Metro back then).

Dave pulled his car up in front of the dealership. I got in my new car and as I drove out on the red carpet I felt even more excited than the woman on the Saturn commercial looked. We drove to the gas station first. There was a ten dollar bill in the envelope that Brenda gave me. I filled the tank. We headed south on highway 45 through the corn fields back towards Urbana. Since we had left the lemon chicken to die, Dave suggested we go out to eat. We met at the Steak n' Shake on University Avenue and parked our Metros next to each other. I was in heaven. After we ate, I told Dave I would meet him at home. I had to drive around for a while to enjoy my car and reset all of the preset buttons on the radio. They were full of country stations.

My little car and I have spent over 93,000 miles together – mostly on the trip between Champaign and Chicago. A lot of people have cars with that many miles on them – but I’m betting the miles were accumulated during short trips to work or quick runs to the store, and maybe the occasional road trip. Most of the miles that my little car and I have spent together have been on the two and a half hour trip to Chicago from Champaign. We escaped together almost every Friday (sometimes Thursday) by pulling out from in front of the Foreign Languages Building in Urbana and heading straight for I-57. Sometimes we would stop at the gas station on the edge of Champaign for a fill up, a bottled water, maybe a candy bar, and usually a lotto ticket. We didn't stop until the traffic in Chicago forced us to.

My little car has gotten one new set of tires, and a new muffler. It has may dings and scratches from being parked on Chicago streets. It has hit a box spring and a load of sand on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago. It has been hit by a dingbat in a monstrous SUV who put her SUV in reverse after a fender bender on the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. It has saved me from countless crashes – including being crushed by a load of scrap metal plummeting from a tractor trailer that overturned on a ramp that crossed over the Dan Ryan Expressway. We spent three hours just sitting on the Dan Ryan and reading and eating M&Ms smartly purchased after a rare stop to hit the bathroom in Peotone. I don't know what made me stop to use the bathroom. The trip had become a commute at that point – I would go when I got to the city. I stopped that time and went to the bathroom and bought a treat. As I reached the city I learned that all lanes of the Dan Ryan were closed because someone in a Pepsi delivery truck decided to tell a police officer that he had a lot of guns and was planning to kill himself.

My little car has afforded me parking spaces that no other car could fit within. I have eaten countless meals and sung countless songs in that car. We have survived major thunderstorms and inches and feet of snow. I even have pictures taken from inside my little car of tornado conditions on Interstate 57. My little car and I got hit by flying debris as we passed a wall cloud that was brightly lit by the setting sun. We headed off at the next exit ramp that then crossed back over the interstate so that we could sit up high and get more pictures. [Note: Dave was not pleased when he learned about this and still does not like to talk about it.] I left the light blue smudge from flying housing insulation on the car for a while like some kind of badge.

As I drove around the north side of Chicago and Skokie running errands yesterday, I found myself falling in love with my little car again. She has been waiting patiently for me. I used to drive her every day – and fill her with gas twice a week – and sing songs with her. She has been sitting alone on the street. I drive Dave's VW a lot and I like it – but I find that I like driving my little car a lot more. Everything is simpler and tighter. No automatic buttons or automatic steering. No Bauhaus interior or big key fobs that open and lock the car with a loud retort from the horn. Just a small engine and little seats and two long keys (I had to have a new ignition put in when the car key broke off in it once) that say GEO on them.

I look forward to having a job someday and making enough money to buy a new car. But I know I will cry when I retire my little car. We have seen a lot together.