Car of Wonder

When I was a young man, my friends Lance and Jeff could identify the make, model and year of a speeding car backlit by the sun from a quarter mile away.  At night.  I, on the other hand, couldn't even tell you the make unless I was close enough to read the nameplate.  Even then, I had to squint.  For awhile there, they tried to teach me to recognize the differences between a '65 Mustang and a '64 Mustang.  I knew this was important, that this knowledge would somehow make me a real man, so I really gave it my best effort.  The problem wasn't that I was incapable of learning the subtle nuances of headlight width and keyhole diameter or whatever.  The problem was I didn't care.

I didn’t care to the point that, when my wife Jenny was pregnant with our first daughter, we drove a sixteen-year-old Toyota Corona station wagon.  The dealer probably listed the color as something poetic, like “goldenrod”, when a more accurate description would have been “phlegm.”  The car would stall at stop signs and overheat in hot weather and would take twenty seconds to reach its top speed of 55 miles per hour.  The interior smelled like someone had burned an old sneaker in the back seat. 

And this was our good car.  Our other car, a sedan, was an eighteen-year-old Toyota Corona.

My dad was the original owner of both cars.  He had given the station wagon to us in exchange for a car which also happened to be a sixteen-year-old Toyota Corona.  The eighteen-year-old sedan had been a college graduation gift.  My dad had seen a chart in his favorite magazine (Consumer Reports) where he learned that Toyota Coronas had the best repair record.  Seeing the column of red dots when other cars were getting white dots, or half-black dots, or (God forbid) black dots, must have warmed his engineer heart, because he ended up buying four Toyota Coronas. 

And they were indeed reliable.  For all the years we had the cars, all we had to replace or repair was the oil, the tires, the wiper blades, the spark plugs, the brake pads, the brake rotors, the fuel filter, the air filter, the hoses, the ceiling head liner, the clutch upper slave cylinder, the clutch lower slave cylinder, the clutch, the alternator, a sun visor, the water pump, the ignition coil, the starter, the distributor, the carburetor, the radiator cap, the radiator, the exhaust manifold gasket, the head gasket, the head, the driver’s seat and the odometer cable.  If I had replaced the seatbelts, I would have been required by law to buy a nameplate that read “Monument Car Parts” because there would have been nothing left on the car that had been manufactured by Toyota.

The cars had amusing quirks that made every trip, no matter how short, an adventure.  For example, after a prolonged session of night driving, we could pop the hood and see the exhaust manifold glowing a molten-metal red in the darkness. I shudder to think about what a car that earned black dots in Consumer Reports would have been like.

That year, I was involved in a summer mission week in Sacramento sponsored by several churches in my area.  I was placed on a team with Karen and Steve, a young couple from England.  I say “young” because they were my age. The first time I really got to spend time with them was the hour-and-a-half drive from my home town of Antioch to the state capital.  In order to impress my foreign guests, I took the good car.

About a half hour into our trip, I noticed that the temperature gauge was rising close to crisis level, so I turned on the heater.  I explained to Karen and Steve that every car’s heater operates like a smaller version of a car’s radiator, and that turning on the heater actually causes the engine to run cooler.

I should explain at this point that the temperature outside the car was 105 degrees.  In England, a cold rain falls twice a year--once for five months and the other time for six.  If the temperature reaches 80 degrees, the newspaper headlines scream “COR, WHAT A SCORCHER!”

Still, Karen and Steve seemed not to mind.  As we winded down delta roads and the sweat dripped off our faces, we chattered away happily.  They were absolutely thrilled to be in America and were eager to point out the subtle differences between our two great countries.  “In England, this car wouldn’t be allowed on the road,” was an observation Steve made more than once.

Despite this, Jenny and I became best of friends with Karen and Steve.  They returned from England several times to stay with us, giving us many more opportunities to have adventures in our little station wagon.  Once, on another 100+ degree day, it overheated and left us stranded on the side of I-680.  This happened only fifteen years ago, so you can understand if it is still too painful to recall in detail here.  Let it suffice to say that the story ends with Steve, Karen, a fragrant guy named Dave, and me, crammed into the cab of Dave’s tow-truck.  I was pressed up against Dave with his stick shift between my knees.  Every time he changed gears I sat up a little straighter.  By the time we reached our destination, Steve was shaking, Karen was in tears, and my voice was an octave higher.

That was the trip that inspired Karen and Steve to compose a song about our vehicle, to the tune of We Three Kings:  The chorus starts:

Car of wonder!

Car of fright!

Car with engine burning bright!

We no longer own either car, and believe it or not, Karen and Steve are still our friends.  They have visited us here and we have gone to England to see them more times than I can count.  They used to kid us a lot about our old cars, until the day when, during a drive through the English countryside, we were stranded by the roadside because the windshield wipers stopped working-- something that would never happen in California.