By Jim Hagarty
Our family has two cars. We are living the American dream. Most days, it doesn’t matter to us that our cars are just a touch shabbier than the old truck The Beverly Hillbillies used to ride around in with Granny in a rocking chair in the back. Yes, we do get envious. We can’t fit a rocking chair in either car.
We are only able to keep these junkers on the road because we have a genius for a mechanic. If he was a medical doctor, there would be people walking around our town well into their 150s. He’s younger than us so we are hoping our driving days will be over just about the time he hangs up his wrenches and oil can.
Many people who own beaten down jalopies know a little about cars themselves which is how they are able to keep their wrecks on the road and the right side of the law. Collectively, my wife and I know this about cars: A sedan has four doors and the AC button, if it worked, stands for air conditioning.
So, we pay the car bills and keep on truckin’, in Beverly Hillbilly fashion, minus Granny.
However, our ignorance leaves us open to friends and neighbours who like to assess from a distance what is wrong with our vehicles. In short, we believe what they say even though we have absolutely no reason to have faith in them.
Our oldest car, manufactured in 1997 and released on an unsuspecting world, started making terrible sounds a couple of weeks ago. The faster the car goes, the louder the sound is. It sounds somewhat like a space shuttle ready to launch without all the smoke and TV cameras, at least so far.
So a friend drove it.
“It’s your transmission,” he declared, shaking his head. “The car is done. I wouldn’t put a new transmission in a car this old.” Most people wouldn’t put gas in a car this old, so what was his point?
“Don’t drive it out of town,” he ordered us. So we don’t.
Friday night, my wife and I were driving along in our other car, foisted on the general public after emerging from the car factory in 2005. Suddenly, there was a terrible clunking sound from the back end, like might be expected if we had somehow driven over a landmine. Our town of 35,000 souls in Southern Ontario, Canada, is not heavily mined. We ruled that out. As we did a rocket attack by insurgents. Fortunately, the local police have kept insurgents on the run in our town and they are not a big problem. Kids on skateboards? But I digress …
We called a tow truck and our car soon disappeared out of the parking lot and on its way to our friendly mechanic’s shop. It was a Friday night, he doesn’t work weekends, and we had all weekend to worry about the fate of what had been the better of our two cars.
We asked our friend of the transmission assessment noted above what might be wrong.
“It could be the differential,” he said, with what appeared to be a sad look on his face.
“What the hell is a differential?” my wife and I said to ourselves after our long walk home carrying 45 pounds of groceries. I suggested at one point that we should just sit down and eat the groceries and be done with it but my proposal was spurned.
So we have spent the past two weeks in a morass of transmission and differential worries.
Our mechanic called on Tuesday.
“Got your car fixed up,” he said, and explained that the problem was a broken spring. No differentials were harmed in the making of this movie.
Today I drove to the mechanic’s in the old jalopy with the defunct transmission, to pay the non-differential bill on the other car. I fully expected to hand over a thousand dollars. The bill was $129.
Pleased, I asked him about the other car, the doomed one with the bad transmission, and told him our friend’s diagnosis. He smiled.
The mechanic took it for a short spin.
“It’s a wheel bearing,” he announced on his return. “No big deal.”
So, between Granny Clampett, landmines, insurgents and the friend who is always wrong about car troubles, apparently, we have made it through another week.
We have a little shrine in our home dedicated to our mechanic. We have a framed photo of him on the wall, and below him burns a candle in old soup can.
We pray for him every night before bed.
