Old Car and Wet Dog

I also tend to like cars that need me. To me, cars are like old screen doors. I know that if I jiggle the latch and move it this way, it will open for me and no one else. And that's the kind of cars I like. So I'm the worst possible kind of consumer to do a test on. I like idiosyncratic things. . . . .

Jay Leno, Popular Mechanics, Feb. 2000

Cars are like rolling diaries, metal and plastic and paint tableaux of the last ten years of their drivers' lives ... every dent, every drooping slice of chrome, has a story behind it.

Jim Atkinson, Texas Monthly, "Heaven on Wheels," Sep. 1984

 At times, the only way to get to certain parts of my place is by car. Rikki Rondo fulfills that role for me. Old, not exactly beautiful, and funky. Funky not just in looks but also in smell, as Rikki has  been used to haul everything from garden  manure to (at one time, and all at once) six dogs. Some smells never go away. Even now, with only one dog, the almost permanent nose prints on the windows make me feel that I am driving in a perpetual fog, coupled with the fog of the miasma created by wet dog (rain or lake, it doesn’t matter).

I remember when we bought the car. The dealer went on and on about that feature or another. Eight cup holders!  Really.  Who actually uses eight cup holders? The DVD player built into the ceiling of the car. We didn’t want a DVD player. It came as a standard feature. What we were concerned about was whether we could fit more than one giant sized dog crate in the back for those times we went sheep-herding, or to agility, or tracking. The dealer was rather nonplussed when we produced measuring tapes and measured the dimensions of the cargo space, having armed ourselves already with the dimensions of the dog crates.  But it has a DVD player, and eight cup holders, he offered again. And it’s shiny.

We did end up buying Rikki Rondo. But almost solely because it had spaciousness in the cargo area. Now with less to haul, I would still not part with it for a smaller car. It has grown comfortable, like an old pair of slippers, warm and familiar. It has earned my trust, I have faith that it will not fail me on dark, rainy streets in the middle of nowhere.  I have grown used to its (funky) smell, to the tricky positioning of the seat each time the shorter me drives it after my husband has.  It has earned the role of being another sort of ‘place’ in my life, carrying me to other places of discovery.