Think on This

By Sandy Long

Old cars and imperfection

I’ve got an old car. Not an ancient car, but it first hit the asphalt in 1987, and has since registered more than 170,000 miles. As cars go, it’s not terribly fancy, but it is functional. With only four cylinders, it’s carried canoes, moved me from the family home to an apartment across town, then helped usher me and my stash of accumulated stuff out of the city and into my current rural home. It’s tackled many a dirt road in search of a good place to hike and motored around the Adirondacks and the Blue Ridge Mountains. Overall, it’s been a good car, great on gas, solid in body, needing mostly routine things like tires and oil changes. It’s got some weak spots, particularly related to the heating and cooling system, but then again, can’t we all find that place within us that seems to break down first, that calls our attention more than the rest?

Personally speaking, my biggest challenge is to remain focused and thereby, to finish the million things I’d like to do. I have yet to become perfect at this. In fact, I have not come terribly close. The world is wide, and life, so maddeningly short. So I try... and try again. Like my old car, I keep on keeping on.

My first old car was a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle. It got to go along on many youthful outdoor adventures. It never carried a canoe (though I’m certain it would’ve tried) but I filled its front cavity to capacity with camping supplies. I kept that car going beyond the point where it began begging to be released from the road, but I’d still drive it today if it hadn’t rusted out from under me.

Sometimes in dreams, it’s back again, the stiff wheel straining in my hands, the bubble of beautiful stereo sound moving down the macadam with me. Then I remember how it stuttered dangerously around looping curves, how every time it rained, the floor developed mysterious puddles with no traceable origin, how snowflakes skittered up in front of my face through the defrost vents at the base of the perfectly flat windshield. If you had a Beetle, you’re nodding by now. But even if you didn’t, you know how it goes with old cars. They’re the best and they’re the worst. Some days you love `em; some days you’d like to send `em over a cliff. Life is like that, too.

Most days, the engine hums, the horn works, the headlights carve a path home through the dark. But then there was the night my car chose to release the long underspine of its exhaust system onto a road near the cemetery I found charming during daylight, but chilling at 2:00 a.m. And that early winter day, bitter and biting, when I turned the key in the stiff ignition and heard—nothing. How could my car betray me this way? I had a full agenda of things to focus on, things to finish!

Life rocks with imperfection and rolls with rightness. By which I mean, somehow we take it all in, do with it what we can, lay aside the rest and go on. Do we get lost along the way? You betcha. Mired in something dark? Uh huh. But along comes some spark that lights it up a little, just enough to wink of possibility. Let’s admit, the car usually starts. And on the day it doesn’t, let’s not forget the many times it did—and will again.