By Kristen Tribe | Published Sunday, June 28, 2009
After lots, and I mean lots, of careful car shopping, my dad purchased my first car - an '87, four-door Chevrolet Celebrity. It was practical. It was reliable. It was rose-colored. Sigh.
And while not flashy, it was free to me, which I had been taught was a good deal.
My dad took time to show me how to properly wash and dry the car to ensure minimal streaking. He also taught me the art of waxing, and I was expected to do these things on a regular basis.
In the wintertime, he even let me wash it in the barn so I could use hot water.
He showed me how to check the oil and made me change a perfectly good tire in the driveway, just to prove I could.
He wanted me to be able to take care of myself and not have to rely on anyone. He wanted me to be independent.
When I was a sophomore, I broke my left leg and had to wear a plaster cast for eight weeks. One dismal morning I had a low tire. It was raining, I was on crutches and in my mind, it would just be too hard. I felt sure Dad would take care of this for me.
Not so.
After much whining and complaining on my part, he insisted that I go fill the tire myself. I was furious. I laid out a list of reasons why I couldn't and why I shouldn't: the rain, my cast, the fact that it couldn't get wet.
At 7:30 a.m. I was at the gas station, balancing on one leg in an awkward squat at the back left tire of my Celebrity and begrudgingly filling it with air. The rain had slowed to a drizzle. Lesson learned.
The Celebrity served its purpose. It ran for two good years before it began shuddering and shaking so that my parents thought it was no longer reliable.
By this time, I was a senior, and my younger sister was about to get her license, so my dad bought us a car to share - a 1989 Chevrolet Beretta.
It was two-door. It was the picture of cool compared to the Celebrity.
It had been totaled and rebuilt, so my dad got a good deal. Just as he did with me, he taught my sister basic car-care skills, but right away, we encountered a couple of situations that were beyond our level of expertise.
We told Dad we couldn't see while driving at night. The headlights were working, but we couldn't see more than a few feet in front of the car.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"Well, the lights come on and we can see a little bit, but, but it's just hard." We couldn't explain it.
"But the lights work?"
"Um, yeah, we guess."
"OK, then."
So that was it - until he took it to be inspected.
"Everything looked fine except those headlights," the mechanic told him. "About the only thing they were good for was snake huntin'. They were pointed straight down."
The second problem with our beloved Beretta began plaguing us in the heat of the summer.
My sister and I would jump in and immediately crank the air conditioner on as high as it would go. The blast of warm air smelled a bit moldy one day, but it gradually disappeared over the course of the drive.
The next few days we were greeted by the scent every time we started the car, and every day it smelled a little worse. It went from noticeable to downright nasty within three weeks, inciting gags and dry heaves. My sister and I even began driving the first several miles of any trip with our heads hanging out the window.
Of course, we had complained at the first hint of a stench, but Dad could never smell anything. It was always gone by the time we got home.
In the obviously offensive stage, the odor never went away. It seemed to hang in the air, permeating the interior so that even strategically placed air fresheners could not mask it.
Now Dad could smell it. He decided he should take a closer look.
And to our dismay, and probably even more so to his, he found a mouse in the air conditioner, a long-dead mouse.
The body was rotting, which resulted in the horrific smell, but every day the air conditioner was freezing the body providing temporary relief from the stench. Whenever we turned off the ignition, it would thaw out and begin stinking again.
I never actually saw the mouse. Dad disposed of the body, and my only memory of the incident is the smell.
It probably went against his better judgment to remove it for us. But we were grateful.
Sadly, I don't keep up the minivan that I drive today as well as I did my cars back then. On any given day you'll find an assortment of toys, books, and even a few stray fruit snacks on the floor.
But on that hot day in the summer of '93, my sister and I put those washing and waxing skills that Dad painstakingly taught us to use.
And left the windows down for the better part of the summer.
