Little Scratch Does Wonders For New Car
The post-purchase afterglow still lingers.
When people ask me what I’m so happy about, I smile my secret smile. Sometimes, I even sigh my contented sigh and get this overwhelming urge for a cigarette.
It’s the new-car afterglow, and it ranks up there with the best feelings a man can have, alongside that stinging feeling you get in your eyes when champagne is poured over your head while accepting the World Series MVP trophy.
Maybe you’ve felt it yourself, even with a late model used car, or even with a $350 VW Bug. All I know is, ever since I bought a car a few months ago, I have been a satisfied man.
Like many men, I don’t often get a thrill from buying things, but I make an exception for things with steering wheels. This baby has a steering wheel and all-wheel-drive and one of those key-chain doohickeys that allows you to unlock your doors from 10 feet away, meaning that you can essentially channel-surf your own car. However, there’s a dark side to this post-new-car syndrome, and I don’t mean the obvious dark side, the one that involves a 72-month payment book. No, this one is a nameless dread, which, although nameless, I have named. I call it “The Fear of Scratches.”
It was particularly bad that first week. Bad? It was pathological. I remember my 17-year-old son asking me if he could take the car over to his friend’s house.
“Take it?” I asked. “Do you mean drive it?”
“Well, yeah,” he said, apprehensively.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t want it getting dirty.”
“Dad, it’s a car,” he said. “If you’re gonna drive it, it’s gonna get dirty some time.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what I mean. That’s why I think we should never, you know ….”
“Should never what?”
“Drive it.”
(Son looks at me for a long time without saying anything).
I relented eventually. As much as I didn’t want the car actually driven, I soon recognized that for a car to live up to its potential, it must be taken out on the street occasionally. The difficulty is that the street is full of rocks, potholes and other cars. Even while parked innocently in the grocery store parking lot, the car might be nicked by some other car door or by some runaway shopping cart or by a sudden freak hailstorm or by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Rainier or by a piece of falling space junk or by a Wisconsin cheese ball that comes flying out of somebody’s grocery bag or by …
Sometimes my imagination gets carried away.
The point is, it’s not easy to let your car out into that treacherous world where bad things happen to good cars. Yet it must be done. For several months now, we have been allowing the car to make its way in the world. Yet the dread lingers.
Will this fear never go completely away? I was afraid it might not, until I got some sage advice from a friend of mine, a battle-scarred dent veteran. We’ll call him Fender for the purposes of this story, Frank Fender.
“You know the best thing that can happen to you?” said Fender. “A little scratch. Nothing big, just a little scrape in the finish, a little dent in the plastic bumper. It happened to me. It was the moment I had been dreading: A supermarket parking lot, a Chevy Blazer, a little kid opening his door just a little too carelessly. A split-second, and then it was over. And you know what? I hope that happens to you someday soon.”
“How can you say that?” I said, choking with emotion.
“Because after that first scratch, that’s when you find peace,” said Fender. “Only then can you accept that life has its share of dings, and so do cars. You can move on.”
That evening, as I walked up to my car and saw that ugly scrriiiinchh right across the left front quarter panel, I discovered that Fender was right. My feelings could only be described as philosophical.
“I have this surprising feeling of peace,” I thought. “I can relax now, for the first time since I bought the car. I never thought … Wait (running finger over scratch) Yes! It’s just a little mud!”
To leave a message on Jim Kershner’s voice-mail, call 459-5493. Or send e-mail to jimk@spokesman.com, or regular mail to Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210.
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