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How
I Became Intimately Involved with My Car
Thus
reassured, I drove the car to the Department of Motor Vehicles
to regis¬ter it. I parked the car, turned off the ignition,
locked it, and found that, sitting there in the middle of
the parking lot, the car was singing! A bit puzzled, I rechecked
the ignition and the radio, but everything was truly shut
off. And still the car sang. By the time I returned, all was
quiet. But that night, when I took the family out to dinner,
old Tweety Bird began to sing again. Several weeks of filling
and refilling the radiator, changing the coolant, putting
gunk in the radiator to block any leaks, and so on managed
to reduce the singing somewhat. But when I found out, many
dollars later, that all she had needed was a new $2 radiator
cap, I was made abruptly aware of two things:
? Tweety was mine, and my responsibility. If she didn't work,
I wasn't going to be able to, either.
It would be impossible to enter this symbiotic relationship
properly if I didn't know anything about her, because the
garage bills were going to send both of us down the drain.
So I conned a friend of mine (who happened to have two sets
of automotive tools) into taking an auto shop class with me
at a local adult education center. I discovered that cars
are pretty simple things to deal with. Instead of a bewildering
array of weird metal objects and miles of hoses that threatened
to blow up if I turned a screw in the wrong direction, I soon
found that a car is just a series of simple Rube Goldberg
mechanisms linked together (with a computer thrown in now
and then that even professional mechanics need specialists
to deal with). Most maintenance, tune-ups, and many repairs
involve only a few, isolated gadgets, and cars are very good
about sending out signals telling you clearly what's wrong
- if you know how to hear, see, smell, or feel them.
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Used
and New Car Menu
