Ferdinand
Atlas had Wolfgang yesterday and . . . wow.
Poor Wolfgang leads a hard life with me. I’m always expecting him to go bouncing over farm tracks and to climb up banks, so I can park him far enough off the road (or equivalent) for Land Rovers, tractors, and bewareable chestnut mares having bad days to get past him while hellhounds and I go questing for adventure.* We frequently come back from these excursions with frondage** dangling from our undercarriage.*** And then there is the variety of mazes we need to penetrate/extricate ourselves from daily: the parking space at the cottage alone is at least graduate level in tactics, area of specialisation: wigglibility. There is not merely the little cul de sac itself which is just about wide enough for your outside mirrors so long as you don’t go in for ranks of great horny mirrors, there is the fact that it’s a steepish hill and that the turn into my car-length driveway is steepisher, there is usually a great houseboat on wheels thing in the single space next to me and the tiny brick retaining wall on the other side of my space which I measured for carefully when I asked Atlas to build it, because there’s a perfectly good strip of garden there if there were some way to keep the dirt in, turns out to be Fractionally Too Tall . . . and my Grand Neighbour at the top of the hill, on the other side of the fence that my not-quite-little-enough wall retains to, has the reprehensible habit of leaving his curly wrought iron gates open the near side of which blocks my driveway.
So I’m afraid Wolfgang tends to leave bits of paint behind kind of a lot. Also he lives out and I never have time to take him to the car wash . . . If this were Maine, he would be a rust bucket by now: and if we’re about to start having spells of Real Winter I need to get my act together better. I’ve been meaning to ask Atlas–who is a mechanic and General Vehicle Person along with his creative carpentry skills–to patch poor Wolfgang up†, and I keep putting it off due to Dealing with Jungles etc. Yesterday was finally the day. Atlas came round and picked up the car key, and I didn’t see him–Wolfgang, I mean, not Atlas–again till I drove down to the mews for supper, by which time it was dark. I did have a faint tingly sense that Wolfgang was redder than usual but it wasn’t till this morning . . . wow. If you didn’t look at the number plate†† you might say, hey, new car. Atlas is amazing.
In Maine I had a Subaru station wagon for commuting from New York City with fifteen or so dozen H&H bagels in the back.††† No, really. I’d survived my first winter back in Maine–after a few years in that soft option‡ Manhattan–with my first MGB‡‡ but I decided the eccentric artist thing could be taken too far and I wanted something that didn’t leak, whose heater produced heat, and whose electrics were not infested by mad misogynist‡‡‡ gremlins.
I’d also just won the Newbery, which meant I could afford to buy a new car. But you find out that you’ve won the Newbery in January, which is a little late in the season for buying new cars. I’d done my homework and Subaru was the answer, but the only one my local Subaru sales had left was a station wagon. I’d been frugally asking about hatchbacks or thereabouts, but aside from bagels, I was worrying about how many books, black leather, studs, rhinestones,§ and typewriters I could fit in a hatchback, since my life was still in New York City, but Maine had more trees and a better coastline.
And then the only thing they had left was a station wagon. Furthermore a brown station wagon. This was in the days of my consummate aversion to brown. My heart sank. But I agreed to go out in the teeth of the gale, since of course it was galing–gales make you want a new car with a heater, etc, worse–and have a look at the revolting object.
As the salesperson and I were battling across the lot I heard a little voice in my head: Of course I’m brown. My name is Ferdinand.
When we got there the salesperson opened his mouth to start the rundown of the finer points of the last of the ’83 Subaru station wagons. I’ll take him, I mean it, I said, or possibly shouted, as the banshees wailed Noooooooo! Don’t leeeeeeeet her! She’ll be haaaaaaaappy! Ferdinand was a treasure. I got used to the colour.
* * *
* No, no! Not adventure! Please! No adventures!
** This is a word. I just checked the OED. I was going to invent it if it wasn’t.
*** We have less underbumper than we should because it keeps getting sheared off. Yes, we go where no VW Golf should be expected to go, but those whatever-they’re-called are incredibly cheap plastic crap for what they cost to replace. So we’ve stopped replacing them.
† And several assortments of neighbours would be glad if I stopped lowering the level every time I park there.
†† Number–license–plates over here tell you how old the car is, if you can read ‘em. I can’t. I was just beginning to learn the old system when they frelling changed it. But Wolfgang is on the old system, and he’s a P registration, which means he’s a ’96. There are probably readers of this blog younger than my car.^ Which is why I try to stick to ‘frelling’.
^ There are a lot of readers of this blog younger than my MGB.
††† http://www.hhbagels.net/(S(zj40sxn5a1eoyw45j5ywknag))/HHMaster.aspx
In those days they didn’t have a web site of course. Nor, I think, did they ship worldwide. And no, I don’t–sigh–in the first place I can’t face the postage and in the second place I can no longer afford the calories. SIGH. Menopause: when there aren’t enough hours in the day that, if you spent them all swimming the English Channel in cold weather, you could burn off enough calories to eat bagels. I mean, one bagel. Treading water from your shark cage.
‡ JOKE. Give me six foot of snow to that gritty February wind whistling down the canyons any year. And furthermore you can never be sure that you won’t suddenly get six foot of snow in Manhattan.
‡‡ No, really. But–trust me–she was a great improvement on the motorcycle I’d had the last time I’d lived through a Maine winter. There had been a pick-up truck named Wilbur about the place then but I wasn’t legal to drive him.
‡‡‡ Possibly misanthropist. But it’s hard not to take personally.
§ These did me no good whatsoever. People from small towns in the Midwest still stopped me in the street–including in places like the East Village which in those days people from small towns in the Midwest+ had no business being–and asked directions to the Empire State Building or a good local chili house. I tried so hard to look dangerous. Sigh.
+ I am not being geographist. Some of my best friends are from the Midwest.
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