the wacky wednesday worries

“Elena!” I burst into my dorm room and accost my roommate without even saying hello. “Can you give me some advice?”

Elena looks up from where she had been peacefully drinking coffee and looking out the window at the snow-covered world. “Uh. . . sure.”

“Is it stupid to go to town in this much snow?” The heavy flakes hadn’t stopped falling all morning. I’m a southerner (at least by adoption), and I admit once again that I thoroughly lack knowledge about how to order my life in the winter. What does a snow advisory mean? What snow is too much snow? How early do the trucks get out there and salt the roads? What do I do if I hit ice? How much farther than normal should I follow behind a car if there’s a single snowflake in the air? Should I be carrying a shovel in my car? Or emergency flares or something?

“Well. . . I don’t think you’ll die or anything,” Elena said, clearly laughing at my panic. Seriously, though, if those large snowflakes had been falling on Hartselle, Alabama, everything would be closed down. If there’s even a forecast of snow, people buy the grocery store out of milk and bread.

You may laugh, too, but my anxiety level about driving in the snow is acute. Especially since my car developed a coolant leak (out the main intake valve — whatever that means) last week and the “Service Engine Soon” light has been on for a month. Oh, my ‘97 Chevy Lumina. Reliable, sort of, in that it so far it has not yet developed problems when I’m in the midst of the 13.5 hour drive home.

I’m not alone in my car troubles (and I hope not alone in my panic over snowy roads — although that sounds like I am wishing panic on my friends and I am certainly not!). Many of my college compatriots are driving used and/or elderly cars. Most of us also look forward to the day when we have real jobs and can afford a car with a little less personality and a little more reliability.

A car with personality does mean, however, that we can come up with amazing names for our cars. My lovely delapidated Lumina is named Gustav. For some reason, Gustav sounds like a name that ought to be green, like my car, and frog-like (which my car is not, at least, not yet. I’m not ruling out the idea that it may someday transmutate while I’m en route to the grocery store into something green and undriveable, remarkably like a frog). I asked around the office and it turns out that car names can be horrifically original. “The Red Death Wagon” is one Matt remembers from his college days. Apparently it saw 100 mph on a regular basis. “Edna” is another delightful moniker for a mechanical monstrosity. Oh, and my favorite? Dan Custer’s sisters named their car “Shabookie Bessie.”

I think my car got off lightly. Even if I do berate it when it breaks.

Filed under general, absurdity, humor, winter, snow, incompetent southerners, oddly named cars | Comment (1)