Happy Birthday Zera

This weekend, someone very special to me celebrated a birthday.  She is getting to be very old now, and every birthday counts.  And I want to honor her by telling her story.  Our story.

In 1998, a beautiful tan Toyota Camry was born.  She had a tape deck, cd player, clock, cup-holders and two cigarette lighters.  All the new stylish functions for a car back then.  She was bought by someone, and a few years later, traded back to the dealership for a newer, supposedly better model.  But that first owner had no idea that he was giving away a feisty little car.  It is possible that more people owned that little car before being welcomed into my family, but they don’t matter.

The story starts in 2002, when I stepped off the school bus after a long day of 5^th grade, and was startled by an unknown car on the side of the road where my parents usually picked my older sister and I up.  Having been told a plethora of times not to talk to strangers, Sara and I started walking up the road, ignoring the car.  Then my father stepped out of the car, holding a dark gray kitten.  That day, we welcomed this new (to us) car and this adorable kitten, Georgette.  Unfortunately, our other cat didn’t like Georgette and started terrorizing her, leading to urine all over the house, so we sent her back to the adoption center.

But the car stayed.  My father drove it for years. He opened the back seat and stuffed all his fishing gear through into the trunk, and we spilled coffee frappes and other foods in the back seat.  When Sara got her permit, my Dad was ready for a new car and handed the middle-aged car down to her.

The teenager loved the excitement of having her own car, and treated it as all teenagers treat their personal property.  By the time I received it 3 years later, you couldn’t make out what was stain and what was the interior fabric (good thing it was all brown), the clock was broken, and it looked as though a raccoon had snuck in through the window one night and taken a large bite out of the steering wheel.  Apparently Sara gets bored when she drives and began picking at the wheel with her fingernails.

My seventeen-self was overjoyed with my brand new (to me) car, no matter how beat up she was.  And that’s when our bond started growing.  I learned how to drive with her, learned how to speed with her, how to parallel park, merge on the highway and pull a U-turn.  I listened to CDs until one got stuck in the player, then switched to the tape adapter and Ipod.  I spilled coffee, pasta, soup, stir-fry, and let the rain wash the outside.  Summers came with boys and drugs and my little ol’ car stuck with me through it all.

One summer, I was driving to my ex-boyfriend’s house to engage in activities we should have left with our break up.  All of a sudden, the clouds opened up and rain started pouring down.  I switched the wipers to the highest level and it still wasn’t enough.  I thought I was going to die.  And then the check engine light came on.  I had never seen it before and was already terrified, so I called my mother.  She said to stop driving and come home.  I pulled into the nearest gas station and probably cried a little bit while shouting “I don’t want to die a virgin!”

The rain cleared up and I continued on towards the boy, relieved to be alive.  And we later found out that it was just a sensor issue.  The light has been going on and off ever since.

One night during my senior year of high school, I sat in my living room, reading Indian Killer, a novel by Sherman Alexi, for my English class.  In the book, two homeless Indians were sitting on a stairway when two young white men came up to them and starting beating them for no reason.  The Indian man was knocked out, but the old woman suffering from schizophrenia fought back.

Just then, in the middle of the scene, I saw lights flashing outside.  I looked out the window and saw my car’s lights flashing on and off like the hazard lights.  The car was off, keys in the house, and there was no remote key, so I was very confused as to how this was happening.  I went outside to double check and, not only was the car off, keys nowhere nearby, but the light switch was in the off position.  How was this happening?  I asked my mother and she said we’d check it out the next day.  A few minutes later, they stopped flashing and I went back to my book. 

The schizophrenic old woman woke up in the hospital, but remembered getting a few good punches in.  And that’s when I realized the name for my baby.  My car was old, beat up, and a little bit crazy, but she still had spunk.  So I named her Zera, after that homeless Indian in the book, and I still call her that today.

Zera came with me to college the next year and enjoyed travelling back and forth on the mass pike, where we could ignore my parents’ constant nagging to “slow down.”  We were speed demons, me and Z, and we were free.  In college, we had our moments.  I’d leave the door ajar or the lights on and she’d die on me.  One time I locked the keys in the car right under my ex-boyfriend’s apartment window. We had a good rapport with Triple A.  Somewhere along the way, the top of the console got too loose (one too many elbows) and eventually came off entirely.  We only had one run-in with the police, a warning somewhere near my hometown.  But for the amount we sped, we’ve been pretty lucky.

One day, there was construction on a main road and I wasn’t quite sure which part of the lane I was supposed to be in.  In order to avoid the cars on my left, I stayed to the right of the road where the large orange sand-bins were.  Zera’s side-view mirror hit the orange road block and dangled there beside her.  Duck-tape fixes everything (temporarily) and we fixed her up later that year.  But it sure was a good story.

Last summer, Zera had another episode when she starting yelling (beeping) non-stop.  The horn blared for a solid 15 minutes as it sat in my driveway.  Again, no keys in the car, and no one was pressing the horn.  Later, someone suggested that there was probably a remote key/panic button somewhere, but it had been lost a long time ago, and somewhere, someone or something had pressed the panic button.  They disabled the system and she hasn’t had those kind of episodes since.

But she is still getting pretty old.  This past year she started shaking at a red light, and when I pressed the gas as the light turned green, she decided she didn’t want to move forward.  Glad we were on a bridge.  We coasted, rocking back and forth to the end of the bridge and pulled over into a parking lot.  I tried turning it on and off, which is pretty much all I could think to do, but nothing worked.  She was gone (or so I thought).  We called Triple A and they brought her to a nearby shop.  A few days later, they told me they couldn’t find anything wrong with her.  They’re run diagnostics and taken her for a few test drives, but there was nothing wrong.  So I paid thirty something bucks to find out nothing, but at least she was running.

This past May, I made a big mistake.  I left Zera for a “new and improved” car.  My sister bought herself a new car and my family gave me her old (2001) Camry as a graduation present.  I was so excited to have a beeper and a sunroof, a working cd player and clock!  I felt bad leaving Zera behind, but my mother reminded me that she was just a car.

“Most people don’t feel about cars the way you do,” she said.

And so I left her.  I cleaned her out and put her on the side of the road.  Forcing the promises of road trips and mileage out of my head.  Pushing the memories of love and lust and youth into folds of my teen years.

For the past few months, I enjoyed the life of luxury.  I locked and unlocked my car from 20 feet away.  I found my car easily in the parking garage.  I loved my new car.

But there were downfalls.  The new car had a lousy 4 cylinders compared to Zera’s 6.  Therefore, she was not a speed demon.  She did not like letting me unknowingly glide into a 50 while cruising on a 30mph road.

And then came the rain.  My sister had fixed it before, but the problem was back.  The sunroof gutters got clogged very easily, and when the rain couldn’t make it outside, it went inside.  After the first summer rainstorm, the floor of my car was soaked.  I took my shoes off after a long day of work and stepped onto a cold, damp carpet.  And the next afternoon when I woke up, my car reeked.  The moist carpet festered in the confined, heated car.  Mold was bound to grow sooner or later.

I left my windows open for the day, but before I knew it, it started to rain again.  And it rained for 3 days straight.  No chance to let the musty floor dry out.

My sister came over and tried to teach me how to fix it, but it was too late.  The fallbacks started adding up, and I wanted my spunky, schizophrenic old lady back.  I didn’t want to put more work into a new car.  Isn’t that half the point of a new car?  That you don’t have to put that money and effort into your old one?

I talked it over with my mom and she agreed.  I forgot to mention the rust eating away at the side of the back tires.  That worried her, rightfully so.  We agreed that the problems Zera may or may not have were still better than the problems the new car definitely had.

I went back to my first love and put the other car on the side of the road with a “For Sale” sign in the window.  I apologized profusely to Zera, and hope that if she does have feelings, she can forgive me.  The other day, my boyfriend and I took her out to New Hampshire, where she hit 190,000 miles.  And I decided to write our story.

Happy Birthday Zera, only 10K more to go ‘til the big 200!