Automobiles have always held a kind of frightening mystique for me. In fact, in my younger years, I was positively terrified of driving, and as a result didn't get my drivers license until I was 20 years old. I still drive rather ---well --- conservatively.
A friend of mine always insisted on driving in her car, where I would sit, buckled securely in, one set of white knuckles clutching the hanging strap, the other carving my fingerprints into the dashboard as she carelessly drove at reckless speeds over 60 MPH. When I asked her why she never let me drive, she insisted that I drove too slow, and if I were to drive, we'd never get to our destination before it was time to come home. "Nonsense," I told her, "I'm just a safe driver."
"You drive like a little old lady!" she exclaimed, "You should live in Sun City and drive a golf cart."
Yeah, well, how does she think little old ladies got to BE little old ladies? All the fast drivers DIE before retirement age. Why does she think that car insurance rates go down as you get older - insurance companies know that "conservative" drivers are the ones that live the longest (which ensures that they'll still get their money out of us - it'll just accumulate a little more slowly, kind of like blue chip stocks...)
Of course, that's not the only reason I drive carefully. The truth is that machines don't like me, so I try not to make them angry. I've never really had a rapport with any mechanical object larger than a pencil sharpener (and I think that's only because the hole isn't big enough to bite my finger). I was the kid who always lost her quarters in the jukebox or got to hear someone else's selections. And I have a real talent for finding the only retrocarbonic soda-in-a-cup dispenser on any campus. (Retrocarbonic: a quality peculiar to carbonated beverage dispenser machines which causes the machine to deliver the beverage, ice and paper cup in that order. Thanks to Rich Hall and Sniglets.)
Machines seem to have a kind of sixth sense (or is that sixty cents?). I swear the machines know that it's me trying to gain cooperation. Perhaps they have some sort of peculiar communications system where they can relay information to each other about me. However it works, they sure seem to smell me coming. While other kids were selling their stolen dispensered newspapers, making 16 times their 25 cent investment and going to the bowling alley to blow it on non-retrocarbonic sodas that the machines graciously allowed them to purchase, I was still trying to get the catch on the gate to release long enough for me to tear out at least the front page.
After I got my driver's license, I quickly realized that I ALWAYS find the parking spot with the broken parking meter. Of course, I could never really be sure it was broken, since it usually indicated that it had 10 minutes left, and it dutifully accepted my money, only to remain stubbornly stuck at 10 minutes. Cigarette machines have held my twice-paid-for tobacco products hostage until I've given them at least $22.95. And I KNOW that there are cupcake and snack machines across the Midwest with my stale Twinkies and/or Snickers bars permanently jammed between that spring-shaped rod and the glass.
When I lived where there were toll roads, I kept a bucket full of quarters on my dashboard and practiced, daily, the art of "basketing" coins of various sizes and shapes (I can still put a dime in a shot glass from 40 paces). I think I'm still on the highway patrol's Most Wanted Cheapskate list in New Jersey, my picture posted at Howard Johnson's and Stuckey's restaurants across the east coast. There I am, squinting one eye, aiming at the toll booth's five-foot-diameter basket from 10 inches away, only to have my coins disappear into some South Jersey limbo as I drive merrily away.
But, with automobiles, at least, there have been some changes in recent years. A friend of mine who swore she was a witch taught me the secret to gaining the cooperation of our combustible-engine companions. The error of my ways, you see, was my root philosophy of "anything mechanical, give it a good bash!" Glinda (she said she was a good witch!) showed me that you have to TALK to your machines.
"To elicit the kind of profound, interactive cooperation that you seek," Glinda told me (she often talked like that), "you must treat the machine as you would wish to be treated. This is the law of automotive and mechanical karma. You must act as though the metal being with which you desire a interdependent relationship possesses an ethereal is-ness of being."
"Right," I said, "now in English."
"Treat your car like its got a SOUL!" (Fundamentalists: please send mail to the following address....)
"How do you know this?" I inquired.
"You're gonna think I'm weird."
"I already think you're weird."
"I talk to my car."
"You said that. So?"
"My car answers me."
Convinced that Glinda would be fine once she went back on her medication, I thought no more about it. Until a couple of days later when my car refused to start. After doing all the usual fretting, swearing and staring underneath the hood (what are you supposed to look for under there anyway?), I reconsidered Glinda's advice. After making sure that no one could see or hear me, I leaned down and began to talk to my car.
I've had much less trouble with machines since then. And I've learned a lot about my car in the process, like what her favorite color is and that she likes to drive in the left lane. We've begun to build a rather amicable relationship now, only I spend more money at the car wash. (Hot wax treatments aren't a vanity, I learned, but a boost to a vehicle's self-confidence.)
I tried to share my secret with my other friends, but they just think I'm wacky. But when the delivery boy from the grocery store couldn't get his pickup to start in my driveway, I leaned over and whispered to his vehicle.
"Hey lady!" he asked me, "You talking to my car?"
"Yes," I told him, as the engine turned over, "and her name is Scarlette!"
"Yeah, right," he said as he pulled away.
My own car, Shadow, just sat, snickering in the driveway.
