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I Hate Cars
It has come to my attention that many a man returns fondly later in life to the things he hated in his youth. My grandfather was an avid gardener, and in his teen-aged years my father was forced to endure many a weeding expedition. He swore he would never be like his father, gardening, tending to roses. A lawn was quite enough to take care of. It was better with many shade trees so the lawn wouldn’t grow as fast. Of course, I heard all of this while I was weeding said lawn, but I was assured that my task was nowhere near as arduous as his had been. Late in my teens, Dad (supervised as I) planted some chrysanthemums beside the house. He still insisted that he would never plant roses. I grew up, got a college degree, got a job, and moved away. Dad retired down to rural Missouri, where he could experience the small-town atmosphere he had grown up in. Within a few years, we were talking on the phone when he told me what he had been doing that week. He had been planting roses, of course.
That job I had gotten was for a computer company, and for awhile my boss’ boss was a character originally from West by-God Virginia. He had grown up poor in a hard-scrabble existence. Back then, nobody would take charity if they could help it. They just grew their own food as best they could up in the thin and poor soil of the mountains. They grew and ate a lot of beans and corn. He hated that growing up. He swore he would get a job where he could afford to just buy food from a store, where he didn’t have to raise crops, and he would never do it again. Well he got a good job, became a manager with decent pay, and bought a house. Before long, he was looking out at his back yard thinking, “I could grow some corn in that corner yonder.” After a few more years, he was buying a new house with a bigger yard so he could have a larger garden.
In both cases, the things these men hated in their youth became what they treasured as they got older.
Not me, though. I have never come close to being infected by the thing that bored me most in my youth. You see, my father was a caraholic. He loved to go to car lots and look at the new cars. When he bought a new car, which was probably a bit more frequently than he could afford, the next day he would be stopping by the other dealerships to see what they had. This would not have bothered me, except for the number of times I was dragged along on these expeditions. Say that he took us out for pizza or maybe for ice cream after dinner. After whatever treat we were getting, on the way home, we would end up in car lots. These stops seemed interminable. He would carefully look at anything that he might not have seen on the lot before. I remember listening to Mac Davis’ song, “It’s Hard to be Humble,” while sitting in the car in a car lot while my dad looked at the offerings on display. Occasionally, he would make the excuse that as a policeman, he had to keep up with all the makes and models so he could easily identify them in an emergency situation. We knew the truth, though. Dad just loved cars and wanted all of them. If he could have had a new one to drive every day, he would have done that.
At a fairly young age, I came to the conclusion that a car was just transportation. That was all it would ever be for me. That doesn’t mean that I go out of my way to find ugly cars. I happen to think that the four cars I have bought in my lifetime have been fairly good-looking, for the class they were in. All were sub-compacts. I could have afforded larger and more luxurious vehicles at times, but what is the point? My only use for a car is as transportation. My first only lasted three years before it was murdered on the road by a woman who was digging in her purse while driving. I stopped for a red light signaling a bridge was going up. She didn’t see me or the bridge until it was too late for my car. The second one lasted past the car payments. The third I kept for about thirteen years. The fourth I bought used from my brother. Always a mistake, in my brother’s case, but it was only a mild one this time. I had to replace the clutch, which my brother didn’t even know was burned out. (Never let him drive your manual transmission car. He has owned at least three, and has no idea how to tell if a clutch is smoked.) I bought it for about $1,400 ten years ago, and it still serves me well. A few repairs? Sure, but only about $4,000 in total over ten years. It’s a good car. By model year, it’s now 24 years old. Next year, it’s officially a classic car. I’ve never owned a classic car before. I will not care if I still own it when it’s an antique. I have no desire to go car shopping. Ever. This trend does not seem to be reversing itself, and I am far older than my father or that boss of mine were when they started reversing their hates into loves.
Whoa! Whoa! That bridge is going up!
So, you want to talk about cars? Have fun. I’d rather talk about just about anything else. Differential equations? Sure, better subject than cars. The armor used by cuirassiers through the ages? Why not? Military formations and how Napoleon improved them? I’ll bite. Varieties of roses and the climate zones where each does best? I’ll give the subject a listen. Chariotry and how it led to tanks? Eh, too close to cars for me. Seeya, Tank Boy. I’ll go talk with the ladies about something less boring, like make-up or television shows or how that girl said such-and-such to so-and-so and her word choice just seemed so catty. Or maybe I’ll go read a book. But not a book about cars.
How about you? What horribly boring activities are the memories of your youth engraved with? Have you later come to appreciate whatever you hated then?
Published in Group Writing
Hmm. I may have to think on this more. The only one that comes to mind now is haircuts; I wouldn’t say boring but I used to hate getting them. Now…I still hate it, but I appreciate having short hair more.
So, you don’t look like Skip?
I have a van because:
The van is 11 years old, has 131,032.6 miles on it. It has a dent from “I don’t know, Daddy, it was like that when we went back to the parking lot,” and a banged-up left front bumper because someone forgot I’d had to park it on the driveway. It should last another 131,032.5 miles.
I have a ’94 Lincoln Town Car. It just rolled over to 225,000 miles. Still kicking. I plan to get another year out of it. I’ve already had it for 10 years now. It’s the car I got when I first got my license.
Sure, but was there something you hated to do as a kid, something that bored you, that you now like to do? Going to school and studying? Praying? Something else?
Not really. In almost all ways I feel like the same person I was. Then I liked to work hard on a project, or to go for a strenuous hike, or carry 70-80 papers on my daily newspaper route from the time I was 11, and then I hated collecting for the paper (dealing with people). Now I still hate dealing with people (I homeschool and avoid so much hassle that I would loathe) and I still like to work hard (I homeschool through high school).
Then I asked my mom for music lessons and practiced diligently on my own. Now, I bought a clarinet in May and started teaching myself to play it for our homeschool orchestra, in which I played percussion last year.
I wanted to garden then, and I have lots of garden now. I was a member of a big family then, and I have six children and a husband now. I was pretty Catholic then (I prayed the rosary while walking my paper route) and I’m pretty Catholic now (I keep a finger rosary with my spare change in my car to pray on the road).
And speaking of my car… it is a Honda Odyssey that has served me well since 2007. It seats 8 people, which is the size of my family, and has ranged up and down the East Coast from near Canada to southeastern Florida. I love its power and pleasant driving experience. I kind of want a new van though, since the Grey Wanderer has had a couple of issues that will only grow worse. I am hoping for a hybrid Odyssey that is full size and seats 8, but that is not on offer by Honda yet.
Honda criticism: My husband has a newish hybrid Civic, and I loathe the control panel, which is a touch screen. It is impossible to see in bright light. It is difficult to see with dust on it. It is difficult to touch the screen when I am bouncing along my twisty back country roads. The control panel does not show the time when the engine is not running. What is up with that? Also, when you turn off the car, the music doesn’t just keep playing because there is no key in the ignition. Frustrating.
Honestly the fear of having that stupid control panel all the time is a big factor in my being so thankful for my current Odyssey. Long may you run, Grey Wanderer.
I hated going to church as a kid. Now, I’m almost a daily communicant.
The odometer on My Pop’s Lincoln Town Car a few years ago:
Still ran flawlessly when it was sold.
Commie.
I hated going to church as a kid. I don’t hate it now, but I don’t enjoy it enough to go regularly.
I also used to hate driving around looking at fields. I always thought it was super boring and I never understood my parents’ love of “Sunday drives” until my 30’s. Terry and I go on Sunday drives frequently to look at the mountains and out to more rural areas to check out their fields. We don’t even farm, but apparently the farming life hasn’t left either of us.
Sports. I grew up in a large extended family-30 first cousins-and all of us did well in school, but all of our parents lived in dread fear that we would become nerds. Their solution was to demand that all of us play sports and be good-very good-at them, but for some reason, it couldn’t be just any sport. I was actually pretty good at figure skating, but figure skating didn’t count because it was too girly: you had to be good at traditionally male sports. This wasn’t a problem for my brother, or for any of my cousins, but I was terrible at traditionally male sports. I just had zero interest, I had no idea why anyone would want to do what male athletes do, and it was horrible. God Bless my parents-in most respects, they were and are brilliant, but they were so hung up on sports that even when I begged them to let me quit, they refused. The thinking was that sports were every bit as important as school work, and that if you weren’t good at sports, you would fail at life. I believed this until high school, and was incredibly relieved when I realized as I teenager that it just wasn’t true.
I still hate sports, except for figure skating :)
Uh, had they noticed that you were not a boy? (Or is there something about you we should know?)
I hated helping my mom clean house. I always missed a spot. I still hate cleaning house. Thank G-d I can afford to have someone else do it.
And I’m bored by cars. Just give me one that works. We’ve taken all of ours over 100,000 miles or more. So unless I’m inspired by something else about cars, Arahant, you took part of my potential topic. Nice going . . .
As a kid, I hated gardening. I hated weeding; I hated mowing, watering and fertilizing. I had an irrational spittle-spewing contempt for flower beds. I despised anything to do with yard work. I even hated houseplants. I still hate all of that. I chose to live in a condo for that very reason. Some other poor slob has to do all the gardening. He’s welcome to it.
Well, that and he has a longer beard, I think.
This was the 70’s and 80’s; pushing girls into boys’ sports was all the rage among many people we knew, even many conservatives did it. I once overheard someone complimenting one of our pro-life friends on the athletic talent of her daughters: she just laughed, and said “Oh, they have to be good. Their father yells at them all the way home if they aren’t.”
From what I can tell, most of these women do not force their daughters or their sons into sports the way they were forced. This experience has made me very sympathetic to men who are not good at sports; no one should ever be forced to do something they aren’t good at.
Talking about politics, I suppose. I remember being bored to tears hearing grownups talk about Watergate.
You’ve come a long way, Baby.
Accompanying my mom to the neighborhood salon when she went for a manicure and pedicure. Ditched those when I got old enough to walk home safely by myself. Unlike trips to the grocery store or the wet market. Those were always fun.
Edit: Oh. Part of the question is whether I’ve outgrown thinking the activity boring. Nope. Though I would accompany my mom, now in her old age, out of filial piety. If we lived in the same place.
Oooh! I used to get bored with trips to the salon too. One of the salons, I managed to sneak back to the closed-off mani-pedi area and played with the fancy airbrushed/rhinestoned fake nails on display. Got my butt busted for it but at least I wasn’t bored.
@grosseteste must be working for a living, so let me say that this is part of our September Group Writing, the theme for which is Cars. There are still a few openings available if you would like to sign up to start a conversation on some aspect of cars or car-related topics.
I swore that I was NOT going to be a house-cleaning fanatic like my mother, forcing her children to dust every day, and sweep the floors after every meal, and wash all the kitchen cupboard doors every Saturday, and make our stupid beds every single day because — hey — we’re just going to get back in them in a few hours!!
Well, I still don’t love cleaning house. But I figured out right away that if you DON’T clean the house regularly, then really quickly, you’re living in a pig-sty. So, I clean, and I taught my children to clean. But, I sure don’t love it.
Okay, Randy finally came up with one that applies to me. I think my personality crystallized when I was about five and I haven’t changed much since then. But I remember the summer when the Watergate hearings were on, and all I wanted was the Gomer Pyle and Green Acres reruns.
Home repairs. I loathed having to help my father on home repairs because he moods were so mercurial, and he was so apt to yell at me for not wanting to do things his way, or for making slight mistakes.
I can’t say as I love home repairs and improvements now, but they are satisfying to me. There is a sort of grim satisfaction in knowing that I can rip open a wall, repair plumbing, rewire a room, or hang drywall, and as I hate hiring others to do this sort of thing I do enjoy that I can (and frequently do) do the work myself. Don’t like the work per se, but I enjoy being able to do it and do it right.
One thing, though, that I still stubbornly refuse to do, and one that drives him bonkers, is get everything perfectly aligned. A crooked picture does not bother me but it makes him twitchy. A backyard swingset that isn’t perfectly parallel to the house (nevermind that it was 100 yards back) doesn’t phase me at all, but he had us all out with surveying tools to align the one we built for my youngest sister.
Wait, I didn’t know you were my brother…
The one thing my father taught me very well through negative example was that it does no good to get upset at things or about things. He also taught me that being angry and trying to force something just leads to breakage and extra expense. Like you, my early experience with home repair projects was not pleasant. On the other hand, I love to do them. As you say, there is a feeling of accomplishment. I built my computer desk, since I needed an unusual configuration.
My dad taught me that if you get a ton truck stuck in the ditch, or knock a bunch of seed bags off a trailer while taking the truck for a joy ride in the field, he no longer has the patience of a saint.
Did you pick up some new vocabulary?
Nope! I actually have a fairly extensive vocabulary. ;p
Which brother kept burning out clutches? The one my age, or the other one?
I used to spend summers with my grandma on the farm. My folks would call once a week to check up on me. I told Dad during one of these calls that Grandma had made for my breakfast something I had never had before — fried mush.
I found out then that that was not one of his favorites. I liked it though.