I can tell already that the next apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
When I first saw the above photo, I imagined that Avery was getting ready to duke it out with somebody. But the closer I looked, the more telling the infant’s smirk and body language became.
“OMG!” I said to myself. “FOMCOMALAROTDADTS.” (Yes, I DO speak to myself in text, even though I refuse to text on a cell phone.) “I DO believe he’s thinking: ‘I thought you said we couldn’t get a car for CHEAP!’ ”
Supporting that pure conjecture is the fact that the twinkle in his eye has that “new-car glint” (even if his britches usually don’t have that new-diaper smell), and his appendages look like he’s just itching to get behind the wheel!
This wild speculation underscores the fact I’ve got a fertile imagination, so wild, in fact, that I was able to time-travel back to the echo of this defiant exclamation from Avery’s dad, Brendan: “I thought you said we couldn’t get a car for CHEAP!”
The back story: As Brendan’s driving age neared, he became driven in another sort of way — two ways, actually.
1. Driven to get a job to buy a car.
2. Driven to find a car he could afford, with a little parental aid.
To his credit, the lad never whined that he wanted a new car, like some kids get (or whine that they don’t) when they’re 16 (some even at 15), or that we should pay for his car.
I knew he was serious when, after months of saying he didn’t want to get a carryout job at the grocery store down the street, he marched down on his own and put on the apron for his first job other than a few stints of substitute newspaper delivering (and guess who drove).
He never griped about getting the job, and he pinched pennies like mad, because he was on a mission to get his own car. (No WAY was he going to drive a minivan or a station wagon.)
Like most parents, I applauded the effort, without realizing the full, startling implications. At first. Then, I realized he might hit his goal before I was ready for such a transition.
And I really began fretting when he started poring over the classified ads in the newspaper, circling cars that caught his fancy, and fantasy. To make a long short, he searched for months, sighing resignedly whenever I came up with a good reason that this car or that wouldn’t work for him.
And then, he spotted the ’92 Chrysler LeBaron convertible, for a relatively minuscule $1,700.
“You can’t get a good car that cheap,” I said, reluctantly agreeing to drive him across two cities and a suburb to check it out.
His eyes lit up when he saw the convertible, and I admit I got a little verklempt, too. The private owner who was selling us the car told us to pay no attention to the slight chugging at stoplights, as it was just a matter of tweaking the carburetor, advice we heeded — and would regret later.
Brendan paid him some money down, and we departed so I could arrange the $1,100 loan we would share for his first car.
Driving away, he taunted, in exhilaration, “I thought you said we couldn’t get a car for CHEAP!”
To which I replied, “Well, it obviously needs a tune-up, and we’ll see what else.”
And that’s when, if somebody hadn’t already invented the old saying, “nickled and dimed me to death,” we’d have had to invent it. As it was, we tweaked it to “hundred-dollared us to death.”
I don’t want to recite the full litany, although the writing started to appear on the wall, and the checks, and the credit card receipts, and in blood, when a mechanic botched the tune-up so badly that I took it to another mechanic to straighten it out.
The first guy’s solution had been to set the carburetor so that it revved the engine enough to keep from stalling. Which is why it almost bolted through the wall of the second mechanic’s shop when they fired it up to work on it.
There, of course, the service manager noted that those LeBaron carburetors were nearly impossible to tune, and we ended up buying a new one.
Although Brendan had fun with his convertible, as I did with my old ’67 Cougar, it took its toll in angst and money, as did the Cougar. As I said, I’ll not recite them here, as that would just rub salt into our wounds.
I also won’t mention his second car, a Chevy Celebrity that I’ve gotta take most of the rap for as a headache from the get-go until it got gone. (One of the lessons I learned in that venture was that Minnesota’s lemon law didn’t require dealerships to tell a guy he was buying a car that didn’t have the original engine [no WONDER it looked so clean].)
Suffice it to say that we helped the owner of Lloyd’s Automotive on Grand Avenue in St. Paul not only send his kids through school but also undertake a spiffy renovation that prepared his shop to vault into the 21st century, which was just around the corner at that time.
I’ll give credit where credit is due, though, and acknowledge that Brendan more than shouldered his share of the cost. And he’s bought a couple of cars on his own since then.
He even has a little change in his jeans. Why, a couple of months back, right after Avery was born, Brendan took some film to a store up in Minnesota and had pictures sent to me to a store two blocks from my house here in Florida (what’ll they think of NEXT?) — with the notation that I shouldn’t let the store charge me anything because he already had paid.
I appreciated his picking up the tab, but I think he’d better start pinching his pennies now. In the blink of an eye, little old Avery is going to be pestering him to look at cars.
His argument, I suspect, will be that they can get something “for cheap.”
If you think the steering wheel of that old Le Baron vibrated at stop signs, Brendan, you better grab ahold TIGHT, now, because you’re in for a wild ride.
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