2002
At a certain point in my life, I developed the habit of naming my cars. They were always old cars, and they had old lady names.

When I lived in Germany I had an old orange Opel Cadet wagon named Peachy, and she was the ZORGINA band car. We drove her all over Europe, and she was near death for years, and just when it seemed that she would finally go, we drove her from Vienna, via Basel, to the middle of France. It was a good 15 hour drive, and the engine died every time we stopped. So we stayed on the Autoroute all day, parking on hills when we had to pee, and got to the little village where we were staying in the middle of the night (but not before we got lost and stopped to ask directions on flat ground, and teenagers had to push-start us at 3am.) We got to the hotel parking lot, she died, and we went to bed. And the next day, she would not start at all. Not even when pushed. Not even when pushed down a really huge hill. Not even after the entire village pushed her down, and then up, and then down, and then up, and then down the huge hill. She wouldn't start. She had gotten us to our beds, and had given up the ghost. So the village tow truck came and towed her away. I expected to never see her again, but it turned out that all she needed was a $50 part, and we drove her back to Vienna a few days later.

She finally got ravaged on the streets of Berlin. A friend was taking care of her while I was in the States, and noticed that she would not start, so he looked under the hood and found that much of her engine had been stolen. So he called a tow truck to take her to the dump. The towtruck trussed her up and dragger her off, and as they turned the corner, her wheels all fell off and rolled away in 4 different directions.

That was the last image of Peachy. She was a good, orange, Opel. I still have her key.

2007
I was in the Great Room at the First Baptist church this morning, where I was a day-ringer in the choir, waiting for the congregation and choir-regulars to finish their pre-service "adult forum", a round table discussion in the downstairs coffee room in which flock and pastor discuss the past week's sermon. The coffee room is as church basement as it gets, complete with
sliding folding doors and linoleum, but the adjacent Great Room is full of old things (the reason this church is called the First Baptist Church is because it is) --  old clocks and old chairs and old Shaker furniture and old bibles and old portraits of old pastors. Etc. I was sitting in an old rocking chair, rocking, when an old man walked in and said "hello. there's nice furniture
in here. are you waiting for them to finish that forum, too? i always make fun of them because they're getting too big. its gotten so you can't even get to the coffee."

We talked about the size of the forum, and the size of churches (he said the buildings had gotten too big) for a while, and then I offered him the other rocking chair, which was across the room, but he said he could rock anytime at home and sat down in the old stuffed chair right next to me. After some silence -- its OK to be silent with old people, and I was rocking so I felt busy -- he said "you know, you have to have a lot of cards these days. you have a card for the library and a card for the bank, and well its gotten so you need a card for just about everything." And then he pulled out his wallet and showed me his Stop n' Shop card. This was, in fact, the only card he had in his wallet, but I didn’t want to point this out. And then he pulled out a credit card receipt for a restaurant in North Providence, and said "look at this. see?" I looked. Not sure what he was getting at. "You know this place? Its right near my house. Its a restaurant and I drive past it every day." I asked him if the food was good, and he stopped and thought a while, and said "you know, cows are pretty dumb. there was a farmer once who saw a fly go into his cow's ear when he was milking it, and then he looked down in the milk pail, and he saw a fly in it: in one ear and out the udder." 

  I want to be like him when I am old.

  August 15, 2000 

Left Brooklyn at 8:15pm, beat the traffic, smooth sailing, orange moon creeping over the Bronx. Sad about things, sad about the moon (so beautiful its not fair), sad about love (its not fair), listening to Sarah McLaughlin, favorite sad girl music. Car starts getting loud. Turn up the music. Car starts getting louder. Pass New Haven. Car is loud as hell. Pull into McDonald's rest area, right up to the door, because I have to pee and I have no intention of looking under the car. I pee, and look under the car. The exhaust bolts are loose. One is gone. They are really hot, because of course I touch them, and then I have no wrench to re-tighten them. I ask around. You gotta wrench?  I lie on the ground in front of the McDonald's with my head under my car. Nice black man and his wife stick their heads under. He has a wrench, he has a socket set, he has a red metal tool box with fold out compartments. I am happy. He lends me his tools but can see I am inept, ends up getting under the car himself and takes out all the bolts and sets them up into the manifold and puts the nuts on tight, while I talk to his very fat wife and to a truck driver who has somehow joined our company. I am a white girl with three parental black folks, and they think I am 18. She says: you all alone? You a brave little thing! Truck driver says: you seem to know a lot about cars. We talk about cars and about South Carolina, where it turns out they all own land, and about New York City, while the husband is under the car. You can see his nice loafers and his thick gold ring. The wife has a thick gold ring with diamonds and bad polyester clothes. I wonder about this. The husband fixes everything. If he can't fix it, he rip it up. The husband says: it fixed. They offer to follow me on the highway but I tell them I drive too fast, so we laugh and shake hands and they tell me the lord is with me and I drive off. The car is quiet.

Four miles later I hear roar and then clink and then the car is loud. I am, for the second time in recent history, in car trouble and on a highway going downhill. (the last time it was the timing belt, and a bigger hill. I rolled all the way to a rest area with a phone booth and a coupon book for nearby hotels). So I coast. Next exit Niantic, hotel chains and gas stations. A Citgo attendant looks me up and down, palpably, and offers to open my hood with an eagerness that compels me to leave, and so I drive, loudly, to the Ramada Inn down the street, call AAA, and ask how far it is to Providence. Its 67 miles. I am allowed a 100 mile tow. I wait for the tow truck and have a nice conversation about the Military with the overweight Ramada Inn receptionist, who tells me about the Russian submarine trapped 430 ft beneath the Arctic. Her brother was on a submarine once and she knows some Russian people so she is very keyed into this crisis. Those boys don’t have a chance. I agree, and nod. We both look grave. In the Ramada Inn employee bathroom – I am not a guest – I put a sweat shirt on over my sportsbra tank top in preparation for an hour ride with an unknown and therefore suspect tow man in an air-conditioned tow truck. I strategize about the best way to jump out of a moving vehicle while I try to make myself look bad, not too bad, but bad. The tow truck comes and I prepare to meet the lumpy, lewd driver and instead a strapping and startlingly beautiful -- in that conservative too-clean Tom Cruise innocence waiting to be corrupted kind of way -- boy gets out. He has extremely sexy steal-towed boots on. I embarrass myself by trying to drive up onto the flatbed (how was I supposed to know that an upturned thumb meant ‘stop’ instead of ‘drive up’?) and then he gets a call on the police radio that before we drive to Providence, we have to go tow a car out of a ditch. Do I want to come along? I think for a moment about the lobby of the Ramada Inn and the fat receptionist and the boys in the submarine and I get in the truck. We are riding high.

 
Alex is from Poland. A car forced him off the road: she attacked me and I escaped.  He cut down several yards of guard rail cable, rode a 45 degree embankment without flipping over, and ended up in the deep offroad bush. You can barely see his car. He is wearing so much aftershave that either he has been drinking or its his perfume or its both and in any case even though we are outside he smells really strongly of what is probably a combination of bad cologne and a fear of death. The cop is not sure whether to believe his story because a witness said: he just drove off the road. I entertain the thought that Alex was pursued by a spirit car. Two tow trucks spend 45 minutes getting his car out of the ditch, using all their chains and pullies, with one guy standing on the uphill side of the car so it doesn't flip over, while the cop helps by holding onto the roof rack, just in case. And I, on the side of a highway in Connecticut in police car strobe light on a balmy summer evening, talk Alex down. He is agitated.  He came to America 13 years ago, he has three children, he works as a welder with a bunch of Italians. And he really loves his car. Its an '84 VW Rabbitt, and you have to give the guy credit because, once it is dragged out of the ditch, even though the axle is broken and its covered with twigs and leaves and dented all over the place, you can see he's kept it in very fine shape. Alex is laughing and cursing in tandem and he keeps punching my arm to make a point, and yelling in my ear.  He is worried the tow truck men will make his car worse. I try to explain to him about American history and Puritan work ethics, that these are people he can trust, but he isn’t buying it. Our faces are blinking blue the whole time. His English is truly abysmal and it seems to be getting worse, so I start talking to him in Italian, telling him to calm down, thinking that these are probably words he’s heard before. Alex never quite calms down, but he does stop punching my arm. He is getting tired. They finally drag the crippled Rabbitt onto the flatbed at 1:30am and its time to leave. I say: ciao, tutto bene, and Alex says: god is looking at you, and we depart, each in our own tow truck. My Tom Cruise lookalike climbs in next to me and leans his steel boots on the pedals, and as we pull away, I can see the cop handing Alex a ticket, and the flatbed man handing him a bill, and then Alex himself, sitting in the tow truck, riding high, looking weary, blinking orange.