TheBanyanTree: new car new plates old story

[Tobie Shapiro]

March 4, 20000000006



To the driving force,

	Yesterday, we finally got the new license plates screwed to 
the new car.   It had taken the DMV weeks and weeks to send the 
plates, and I am glad to report that the license number is easy to 
memorize and kind of kicky: 5TEE162.  Tee, as in Hee.  It wasn't as 
easy to affix the license plates to the car as I'd thought it would 
be.  The screws on the dealer's plate frame required a socket wrench 
to remove them.  Fine.  We've got socket wrenches of every size.  But 
none of them fit.  That could not be!  Why would the screws be of 
some bizarre size?  To deter criminals?  But that also deters us law 
abiding citizens.  I drove around for a week, at least, with the 
plates secreted in a cubby in the car, wondering what to do.  Feyna 
suggested that I go to the service station where I used to take the 
old van (all the time) while it was suffering from Alzheimer's, 
Congestive Heart Failure, the Dropsie, and Cumulative Sluffoff 
Disease.  They knew us well, had seen me mope over each new sign of 
decrepitude in the van, and had rescued me from many ends of the 
roads.  They would probably screw the license plates onto the new 
car, gratis.  But it was embarrassing.  Here I am, a single Mom, able 
to leap tall buildings at a single bound, able to catch screaming, 
hostile missiles in my teeth, able to deliver two children to two 
separate destinations at the same time.  How could I admit defeat in 
the face of a few screws and a couple of license plates?

	But I pulled in to the service station, intending to show 
them the new car and see what would happen if I mentioned the 
difficulty with the plates.  A grand entrance it was.  They'd gotten 
used to me gliding in with the old van, the car with way too much 
personality, and listening to a fresh new story of what had fallen 
off or sunken in, what had self destructed or what had failed, 
intermittently, to work.  Now I was in a new Honda Odyssey, not a 
dent or a tweak.  There was applause as I stepped out onto the cement 
to tell them my sad story about the socket wrench.  Steve took one 
look at the screws and announced they were ten millimeters.  He 
fetched the socket wrench and affixed the plates in a trice.  He 
admired the car, said it was a good selection, a good car.  And, 
indeed, the only problems I've had with the car, so far, have been 
due to the fact that there are too many bells and whistles.  There's 
that much more that can go wrong.  And it does.  For instance, a 
couple times now, the car has decided that we must be trying to steal 
it, and it won't come out of Park.  The gear shift just sits there, 
frozen, refusing to budge.  Then if we wiggle too much in the car, 
out of frustration or anything else, the alarm goes off.  Where did 
the car get the idea that I was a foreign pursuer, out to abscond 
with the goods?  What mysterious thing was it responding to when it 
finally allowed me to move it into gear?  And how about the remote 
control locks, the remote control door openers?  Why do we need these 
things?  All I can think about is that the batteries will go bad, 
eventually, and I'll have a hell of a time finding the correct 
replacements.  Or the connections will go bad, and will no longer 
function.   Are these things made to last as long as I want the car 
to last (which is forever)?

	What lasts forever?  The old car nearly lasted forever.  When 
the old van was new there were two teenage boys stretching their long 
limbs out in it, and two toddlers squirming in their seats.  Now the 
teenage boys are in their thirties, one about to become a father. 
And the toddlers have grown into a young man who needs to shave every 
day, and a young woman with a driver's license.  That's a long time, 
but that's not forever.

	The years didn't look as well on the metal as they did on the 
flesh and blood.  Tell that to your statue in the park.  Forever is a 
longer time.  I've gone through some rude changes in the mean time, 
and my life has been torqued off its foundation and spun into the 
dizzying air, no longer responsible to up and down, right and left, 
north, south, east or west.  I have to ask myself if this will be 
forever.

	What lasts forever?  Even the sun is going to go supernova on 
us someday way off in the future.  I have no faith in the oceans 
remaining wet, or the land being stable under my feet.  I have no 
faith in faith; it is a slippery thing, and only a whim of humans.  I 
have no guarantee of anything.  As hard as I look, that much harder 
is what stares back at me.

	Yours,

	Tobie
-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net