posted 2007/07/21 at 23:18
First of all, happy birthday Chantelle, wherever you are.
I've got a bit of a dilemma here. Jeff may be facing a situation soon where he doesn't have a car of his own, and obviously he really needs one for driving to and from work. About a couple of weeks ago I found out that my parents were thinking of selling our old 1988 Chevrolet Astro minivan to him, which kind of didn't sit well with me because of my memories of the Astro. When I mentioned this to the folks, they raised the possibility that we could sell my Camry to him instead, and then I could take the Astro for myself. (Although I paid half on the Camry when we got it, the titles and such are all in my father's name.) Basically I'm being forced to decide which car we part with, and I don't think there is a good answer to that question.
The Astro was my family's primary vehicle from the time I was twelve up until shortly after the fire, when we began to worry about its ability to handle long-distance trips (at that point my mother was driving up to Michigan every other weekend to be with her mother, and did so up until her death in 2003), at which point we bought a used 1994 GMC Safari. Obviously the car holds a lot of good memories for me, the first of which being the fact that on the very day that we bought it, my father took me on a five-day vacation up to his parents' vacation home way up off the northern coast of the lower peninsula. I considered this very strange at the time, but I can remember that as night fell as we crossed the 45th parallel, I snuck back to the far back seat of the van, laid on it with my head looking out the side window, and watched the stars and listened to Peter Buffett's "The Waiting." There have been very few moments in my life more inspirational than that.
The Camry, of course, holds the honour of being "my" first car. It's nicknamed "Sean's First Movement" for three reasons: it's the first car that I've been the primary driver of, it's a nice reference to classical music and my own musical roots, and the "movement" part is particularly apropos because the thing is coloured fecal brown. I can't say that I had that good a start with it, particularly as the day we bought it I wound up getting a ticket late at night because I got confused about the lighting controls and wound up driving with my parking lights on when it was pitch black out, but that car took me to and from school more times than I could count. I haven't been driving it so much lately because of the problems I've mentioned on here in recent days, but that car will always hold a special place in my heart.
I don't want us to lose either car, but at the same time Jeff has to have a car here. The Camry gets better gas mileage, yes, but if I do get a full-time job that requires me to move here, it would sure be nice to have the Astro to haul stuff from here to wherever my new residence winds up being. More to the point, I'm very concerned because if we sell Jeff a car and then I wind up moving, the folks will only have the Safari left, and if it goes down then the folks will be without transportation themselves. (Granted, they don't go out that much now that they're working for home, but they still have to go out for grocery runs and the like.) Perhaps I'd feel better about this if I weren't the one having to make the decision. I've never been that much of an automobile enthusiast -- especially in comparison to my father -- but both cars hold fond memories for me, and I don't like being forced to make the choice as to which car we keep and which car goes to Jeff.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon