“Remoted” Workday 191 / Day 289 (Wednesday)

The team at the auto shop has been in touch several times this week, and it’s been mostly good news. The situation is repairable. The cost estimate from the initial diagnosis went down by a couple hundred dollars after further diagnostic work. All in all, it’s going to be fine and the car will be ready tomorrow, and I’m spared the immediate need to shop for a car. This is a huge relief, because car shopping is one of the activities I hate most in life. There is no “dream car” in mind to speed things up, and hasn’t been one since college.

My first not-dream car.

My first car was a used 1977 Chrysler Cordoba and was not a dream car. The dream car at that moment was a blue Firebird I was going to call “Blue Bird,” but there was a delay getting a loan and someone else bought it before I could. I settled for what I could get, which turned out to be a total Grandpa car but it ran and had functioning air conditioning and I was in college and had limited options. 

Driving the Cordoba that stalled at red lights any time it rained was motivation to think ahead and save up for a future car. Back then, the version of the “dream car” cycled through Mercedes Benz, BMW, Jaguar, Corvette and any expensive car depicted in W Magazine or driven by people I knew from where I lived and worked. Life and finances and common sense prevented ever acquiring any of the dream cars when I still cared about them.

There hasn’t been a car model since my late 80s Honda Accord that I even care about. That car had two doors, flip-up headlights, and was champagne beige with a burgundy-brown interior. It had corners and angles and ran great for years of heavy driving until all of a sudden it was dripping oil that burned on the engine. Smoke would come from under the hood at red lights. When it finally died and I was forced to car shop, the sales reps would ask what kind of car I wanted. The only answer I had was “one that looks exactly like my Accord.” But by then, the cars all looked the same to me, with rounded edges like used art erasers. In frustration, the search was abandoned by settling for a two-door Nissan SX-SE that was coming off a lease program because it was available and not horrendously expensive.

Even the current CR-V, bought because a lady talking on a cell phone rammed into me and totaled the Nissan while I was stopped at a red light, was a case of settling. It appeased my now ex-husband, who insisted on a four-door vehicle because once a year we had house guests and needed an accessible back seat and his chosen dream pickup truck was too hard for passengers. Instead of the two-door sporty car I wanted, it ended up being a four-door soccer Mom vehicle, even though I was not a Mom, soccer or otherwise.

Hopefully, before it's time to car shop again, there will be a model I like. Fingers are crossed. And until then, I’ll keep maintaining the CR-V to avoid the inevitable for as long as possible.