Shifting Gears

I drive a 2001 PT Cruiser. It’s silver and basic: no sunroof, plain gray cloth interior, and it’s beginning to show its age. I named the car Maurice, figuring that name was a close male version of Mari and because I like “Space Cowboy.” I enjoyed the idea of the car representing my male “action” side, but the pronoun “he” has never fit, so Maurice ended up being called “she.” Now she is breaking down.

She’s had this problem for a long time that no one’s been able to diagnos. Donny thinks it might be in the computer. It’s a sporadic problem. She’ll drive great for weeks, sometimes months on end, and then one day, the engine light comes on and she can’t shift gears. It sounds like her transmission is going. It’s the kind of thing where I’ll come home and report to Donny that I think it’s really bad this time and Maurice is on her last legs, and then he gets in her and says, “The car’s driving fine.”

The last few weeks Maurice has been more off again than on. I try to see if anything makes a difference. It may sound superstitious, but both Donny and I thought she acted up more when the spare set of keys was used. That was one idea and I quit using the spares. Then I noticed that she really didn’t like idling, so I turn her off at the bank’s drive through window. And lately I’ve been wondering if it could have anything to do with using either the fan or the air conditioning (which means I’ve been taking the heat).

Tonight, after a problem free day, the light pinged on and she lurched away from each stop sign and did not like the climb to even thirty mph. As I accelerated, the mph needle sat at zero and then made sudden leaps all over the chart. I had both windows open and really didn’t want to close them, but the rush of the wind, even going that slowly, made it hard to listen for her shifts. After a bit of strained listening though, I realized that it took accelerating to about 35 mph for the shift to happen, and then, if I took my foot off the gas, she purred along until the next stop sign.

By the time I was heading for home, I was getting taken by the idea of listening for shifts. Then as soon as I started writing this, the darn car felt as if she became a metaphor for my life.

From the male action side of me being a little stalled, to lurching after each stop sign, to terribly sporadic behavior, she fits the bill of the metaphor, and the metaphor fits the general milieu of my life.

For one thing, the speaker’s agent isn’t interested. That’s okay. Seems kind of dumb to get started with something when I’m all over the map, lurching and chugging. For another, I’m not quite ready to retire Maurice. I know I may have to sometime soon. Besides the internal issues, I pulled out of the garage into the poor Cruiser the other day. I crumpled up the front bumper and called my husband with an apologetic “how could I be so dumb” and he, as usual, didn’t think or say much about it. We can both live with a dented bumper. But then the first time I went to open the passenger door, I found I couldn’t.

We were out in the driveway tonight, with a big tow chain running from his truck, and me gently backing up and pulling forward over and over again until we got it just right and the door unstuck.

Backing up. Going forward. Isn’t it absurd? The poor car’s got my juju.

But the door’s unstuck.