My Wife Thinks a Car for Her Husband is a Good Trade

“How many miles do you have on your car?”

I told him. It was a substantial number.

“It’s almost broken in,” I added in a feeble attempt at cleverness.

The man chewed on that for a moment before saying, “It’s almost broken.”

That was unfair. It’s a dependable car. The good kind of dependable. I’ve had a dependably bad car. Each time I shoved a key into the ignition, I was pleasantly surprised when the engine started with no smoke signals detected. I read its dashboard carefully to see if any idiot lights were glowing to warn me of pending automotive doom.

They don’t make cars like they used to. That’s true. That’s the reason we put more miles on cars today.

The only bad habit my current chariot has is that it cares enough to keep a light on for me – the TPMS (Tire Pressure Monitoring System). This light on the dash is a yellow horseshoe with an exclamation point indicating at least one tire is under-inflated, or that a sensor is malfunctioning. I’ve checked the tires and they’re full of air. It may not be the best air, but they’re filled with it. A common cause of the dreaded, shining TPMS in colder weather is the natural contraction of air. I’ve been fixing to have the sensors checked. Like everything in our world, those things run on batteries that insist on dying. The sensors are reset when I drive the car and the light disappears. I celebrate the idiot light’s departure because flats make me tired.

In the 1939 film, “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy (Judy Garland) tells the Scarecrow, “I think I’ll miss you most of all” during her emotional farewell scene.

I will miss my trusty automobile.

My next car doesn’t have to be new, but I prefer a car that doesn’t carry a Bob Dole or Ross Perot bumper sticker. Friends tell me I’m buying someone else’s problems when I buy a used car. I know that’s a possibility. As Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense, might have said while kicking the tires of a pre-owned vehicle, “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

I looked at a used car recently. The “check engine” light was the only thing in the car that worked.

Back when the days were long and the years were short, I rode in old Pontiacs. We didn’t wait for parts. We removed them from a junkyard Pontiac.

I bought my first car (not a Pontiac) for 75 hard-earned dollars. I overpaid because the rattletrap had a swell AM radio. The headlights go off automatically on today’s cars. They did on that car, too, after a few hours.

My life has moved from the iconic shrinking effect of old cathode-ray tube televisions, where the picture collapsed into a bright, fading spot in the center when the set was turned off, to having in-car entertainment or infotainment screens.

When the phone rings or whatever it does, few households need to holler, “I’ve got it!”

We ask people where they’re calling from because it could be anywhere. Every car has at least one cellphone.

We had one landline when I was a boy. If someone asked me where I was calling from, I’d say I nearly made it to the closet before I ran out of cord.

I had a student tell me recently that he had his phone taken away for using it in class. If my teacher had taken my phone away, that teacher would have had to come to my house and rip it from the wall of our living room.

I grew up with a Kodak camera that took 24 pictures before the film needed to be developed at the local drugstore. Now cars have cameras.

My car has a steering wheel. I like that. Some concept cars have had joysticks. No joysticks for this dude.

And I don’t need a horseless carriage that drives itself to an oil change.

I can live autonomously without that.