Car Hop

Olivia let her wishes be known early and often. When you get a new car, she said, I want the silver one.

This, she explains, is because she does not prefer stick-shifting, despite the fact that she's been doing so almost from the advent of her driving career 4 years ago. I still stall out, she says. I'm bad at it.

If, on the other hand, one compiles the sum total of Becca's utterings on the matter (few though they've been,) one comes away with the impression that she likes manual transmissions, prefers the green '99 Forester over the blue '02 Outback, and otherwise has no particularly assertive horse in the race.

What can be said of the blue '02 Outback is that ever since it went to live in St. Mary's County with Rachel a few years ago, it has come into contact with so much mud, guinea pig stuff, and organic farm effluvia that no one apart from Rachel (who is perfectly content) makes any claim on it whatsoever.* (Though I must say I got it nice and clean in April. You may ask why. I will tell you. It was left in my custody during Rachel's 5 weeks in Costa Rica, and I was too embarrassed to take it in for service without cleaning it first. Her room, I will not touch. Well, not at least as long as there's a chance she'll still be inhabiting it.)

So, when it became indisputably obvious that I had 3 girls with 3 jobs going in 3 directions, 2/3 of a vehicle/girl failed to compute as a mathematical result.

Here again, I invite you to wonder why I don't kick my fledglings out of the nest without the padding of a parent-provided car. (Because I knew you were going to wonder that anyway.) I have no doubts that dealing early with the reality of economics is good for humans. If the girls in question showed signs of feeling entitled, or hadn't--from early on--demonstrated a capacity for recognizing what life requires and taking it on, then I would probably see being an auto-enabler as not a good thing. As it is, they understand that--while I help where I can--my future economic capacity is a big question mark covered with scribblings like nursing care, life expectancy, and if/when/what paying job could Emily possibly do?

So, after a bit of foot-dragging, coupled with some online research, I returned to Annapolis Subaru and the pleasantly un-slick salesman Ed Rucker, and came home with another blue Outback. It is mine, and I don't plan to upgrade for years to come.

It was at this point that Becca realized that her baby sister was about to assume main-drivership of a car 7 years newer than the green Forester. And that the green Forester was full of cds, dirt, empty juice bottes, and stuck-on gummy sharks only some of which were her doing.

Olivia took on the cleaning job as gamely as you'd hope for, and--except for one gummy shark which will require overnight cool weather and a chisel--it's now a clean green Soobie. A clean green Soobie which will go in for service on Wednesday, at which point vehical longevity is going to be largely a function of how meticulous each driver cares to be.

I would like to say that, at this point, I'm swearing off parental oversight and intervention in the area of personal cars. But as Rachel drove off on Saturday, after a couple days home, and I heard a car noise (the sort you don't want to hear--a clunk, chink, or squeee,) I looked at our next door neighbor, out mulching his shrub, and made a how 'bout that noise? face. He replied that he cannot count the number of similar noises he's heard emanating from the cars of his 3 adult children as they've driven off over the years. But there's only so much you can do, isn't there?

*I need to append that organic farming, animal rescue, and the development of abandoned and muddy ex-farms into environmental education centers are all goals I deeply appreciate. Not to mention that Rachel has been on the move between living situations and the car has, therefore, been more overstuffed than usual. I'm not knocking, just explaining.