18
The big grocery store continued to be a huge success into the new
year. My worries about money were now behind me and I even took the
opportunity to buy myself a new car. Sorry, I
always confused people by saying that at the time, I
meant a used car that was new to me.
My old import station wagon had not fared well since I had driven it
to Colorado. I had no idea about the routine maintenance a car
needed, and dealership car manuals at the time didn't seem to point
it out either, so I learned about the car radiator needing to be
checked when it overheated. I learned about the oil needing to be
changed once the existing oil had become a thick sludge. I
discovered that batteries needed to be checked once my own died in
the first deep cold of a Colorado winter. By the Spring of Nineteen
Eighty-Five my fourteen month out of state license plates had long
given up the ghost as well. So I went car shopping.
Since I knew I couldn't afford a new car, I went straight for the
various used car lots I had come to see while driving through various
parts of town over the years, I hadn't realized that the
dealerships sold used cars as well. I don't know if that
was a blessing or an oversight at the time. Reaching one
place, I looked over their cars and while they pointed me to various
American brands, I went for the imports given their better
reputations at the time and my own positive experience. While I
would have preferred another wagon, they had a light blue sedan with
a white vinyl top. I got in and took a test drive and it drove
pretty well except for the steering wheel being off by a quarter turn
and the previous owner's girl friend's picture looking up at me from
a special gear shift knob. The payments were in the right range and
I told them I'd take it if they fixed the steering wheel and
addressed a couple other minor things. They grudgingly agreed and I
picked up the car the next day. As part of my financing deal, I was
to get insurance, which I agreed to and then drove the car to my
mother's mobile home and asked her how much I owed her for the
insurance...
She had no clue what I was talking about, so I mentioned how I had
gotten my insurance for the import wagon from dad and so with this
new car it seemed obvious I'd get the insurance from her. She asked
me to explain and I mentioned how, once I got my drivers license in
New England, I knew I had to get insurance. I went to the one
insurance place in my rural New England town and asked them if they
held the policy on my father's car. They told me they did and I
asked how much more it would cost to include me as part of my
father's insurance. It was just shy of three hundred dollars and so I
went to the money machine down the far end of the same shopping
center and withdrew the money and returned to the agent's office.
They accepted the money and told me I would now be included on my
father's insurance policy.
Later that day, the insurance agent tracked me down at the grocery
store where I worked and handed the money back to me, saying that
when they called my father to let him know I had been added to his
policy, he told them to return the money to me and I was to hand the
cash to dad and he would take care of it. Whatever, it
was my first time getting insurance so I didn't know how these things
worked. So when I got home from work that night, I handed the cash
to my father who accepted it and told me I was insured for as long as
I drove the car.
My mother asked how often dad had me give him that amount of money
and I said just the once. She asked to see my insurance card dad
must have given me. Insurance card? She burst out laughing
and concluded that dad had just pocketed the money and I had never
been insured these past three years. Feeling like a fool, I asked
her how I would, then, get real car insurance. She decided to
take me to her own car insurance agent and he signed me up for my
own, personal, car insurance policy. When he asked me if I had been
continuously insured since I had gotten my license, my mother spoke
up and told him I had been.
New (used) car in hand with my first ever insurance card, I found a
company that would come and look at my old car and offer me money to
tow it away and scrap it. I had tried to trade it in but with the
extensive rust damage and being shy of ten years old, they wouldn't
take it. The scrap company showed up by the end of the day and
offered me fifty dollars for it. As I really didn't feel like I
could shop around I accepted the deal, then asked them to wait a
moment. I unscrewed the gear shift knob featuring the girl's picture
from my new car and found I could screw it on the gear shift of the
wagon, with the wagon knob fitting my new car as well.
The burnt orange import wagon that I had known since Nineteen
Seventy-Six was towed off into the sunset... No,
really,
it was. And I parked the blue import sedan in its place.
To make sure I took better care of my new car, I asked Jeff for his
advice on maintenance issues. He told me to change the oil once in a
while and check the brakes from time to time. And so I did have the
oil checked, once in a while, and the brakes checked, when
they made noises... And I continued to learn about the other
maintenance items I should be aware of the hard way: Poor
little blue import sedan. It wasn't until my third car that
I had learned I could buy a third party maintenance manual to read
through and follow to assure that car lasted for as long as it
could...
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