As it happened, the Saturday on which I was offered the bike mechanic job (a great source of relief) was the same Saturday that Brooke's car died (a great source of stress). The car - an old '96 Saturn with over 180,000 miles - was a perma-loan of sorts from Brooke's parents, and we had grown to rely upon it, Brooke commuting to school and me job searching all over the Cities. But its head was cracked (that's car lingo, not a metaphor), oil was leaking into the coolant system, and we weren't sure we wanted to pump money into a car that could soon easily die for other reasons. It had become an ex-car. And yet the passing of the Saturn was also in part a blessing - a chance to gain just a little more independence. (Not to mention, the car lacked personality - even a name! We memorialized it only by whispering a solemn "R.I.P. Little Saturn" as one of it's longer-lived brethren would pass.)
And thus began the long, car-less exile. For a short while, the possibility of not buying another car entered our minds. Yet in a matter of weeks I was to begin my six-day job training in a suburb half an hour away. Also, Brooke's parents and sister, as well as a number of friends, lived a good distance away. Furthermore, neither Brooke nor I particularly enjoyed being in a city every day, and a vehicle was the only real hope of escape to nearby state parks. No, we needed to get another car. But this was easier said than done, especially when we are both poor and our only vehicle just died!
Fortunately, I hadn't begun working yet and was at leisure to car search full-time. And with great generosity Brooke's parents offered to let us borrow one of their vehicles for a few weeks, so we wouldn't be totally stranded. Just when I had turned my back on Craigslist (after a successful job search) I had to come crawling back to look for cars!
So, where to begin? As mentioned before both Brooke and I are to a degree impecunious, so price was a good place to start. Fortunately, both of us were expecting decent tax returns (one benefit to not having money?), and pooling together these resources and other savings/expected income we made a purchasing purse large enough to work with. Fuel economy was the next consideration. We both wanting a cute little 4-cylinder car, so it wasn't too difficult to narrow down the options. Reliability was also a factor (not being able to afford a low-mileage car), so reputable longevity also helped weed out some candidates. The final contestants: the Toyota Tercel/Echo, Honda Civic, Nissan Sentra and Toyota Corolla. Let the search begin!
Me + Craigslist + several days + yadda yadda yadda. Plenty of instances of rising and falling hopes. Dream cars posted on Craigslist and sold within hours. (Once I replied 30 minutes after a Civic was listed [10:30pm], set up a time to meet first thing next morning, and called before I drove over that morning, only to find that he had sold the car the previous night[!].) To make a long story short we found a nice little Tercel at a dealership - only 79,000 miles on the odometer, mostly driven in California - got a mechanic friend (shout out to Bob!) to drive it around, and headed back to the dealer to buy it. When I had looked at it the day before, I think I expressed too much obvious interest (despite earnest attempts to appear indifferent) because though we got him down $500 from the listed price he wouldn't budge from a price we knew to be a bit too high. In the end, we counted the small price inflation a Release from Stress fee and considered ourselves winners.
As for the car itself, Brooke and I both love it. It is teal, cute, and 100% manual: transmission, locks, windows... There aren't even levers that open the trunk or gas lid! You have to get out and open them with the key! The interior feels cheap but cozy, it's clean, and it even has an after-market stereo and speakers. It drives like a dream AND fueleconomy.gov assures me that it should get 30-40 mpg. We love it. As Brooke and I drove back to the dealership at the conclusion of our test drive, she commented on how humble the limited features made her feel. "This car is so humble, like... who was that patriarch who claimed to be the humblest man on Earth? Abraham or Moses? I think it was Moses... plus Moses sounds better." "Okay," I said, "if we buy this car we'll name it Moses."
Thus Moses was brought into our lives and led us from the exile of immobility. And we love him.
(This reminds me that I owe my blog the story of how Guinevere and I parted ways...)
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