You cannot win on a car deal. You are going to get screwed so you better make them kiss you. I have prior dealings with this salesman. He's alright. He's out to make money. I understand that. He's just not a jerk about it. He's not a pest and he doesn't play "hide the ball." The number on the proposal he faxed me on the new car pretty much matched up with the number in my head. The number he put on the trade-in was the number to the penny that I gleaned from my Internet research. So what the hell. Why not pull the trigger on this? It's just a car. Besides, I'm getting kissed.
So why the ambivalence? In the first place, I buy the steak, not the sizzle. I am pretty much impervious to hype and advertising. While I like to drive nice cars, I certainly don't view them as an outward and visible sign of my persona. And when I say "nice" I don't mean "luxury." But it's something else. Something else that I can't quite put my finger on.
Maybe it is this: although I am not a terribly sentimental person-or I don't think that I am-I have some happy memories bound up with the car I traded in today. My friends and I have gone all over the place with the damn thing full to the gills with golf equipment. I have gone to Florida, Alabama, Missouri and Tennesee in the old car. The little boy liked it because it had running boards which he called "siderails." I guess siderails are important when you are not quite 4 and a half foot tall.
In what was one of the worst jobs I have ever gotten myself into, I once hauled pizzas for consumption by the participants in the Little Rock Marathon. In case you are curious, the 2003 Nissan Pathfinder LE will carry 100 10" pizzas in a single load. I carries 4 loads of pizza that day. I had to go to the detail shop afterwards to get the smell of pizza out of the car. It was weeks before I could eat Italian again.
The second worse job I ever got talked into was when PM and I made two trips to Jacksonville to get a plastic shed for his backyard. The damn thing was hanging out the back about a foot. PM had to look out the open back to advise me when it was safe to change lanes. It was a sufficiently ridiculous "guy" thing that he felt compelled to write about it in his column in the paper. It was also sufficiently ridiculous that one of the other columnists- a female otherwise not known for saying bad stuff about people-was moved to write me to tell me she thought we were "idiots."
Hey! At least we weren't drinking beer at the time.
I got the first ding in Jackson, Mississippi. Somebody shanked one off of the fairway at Colonial Country Club and hit the hood. It sounded like an RPG had hit it. I thought the airbags would deploy. This is an example of the kind of luck I have. I drive by War Memorial Golf Course here in Little Rock 2 or 3 times a week. The worst golfers in the world-guys worse than me even-routinely send projectiles into Fair Park Boulevard and Markham Street. I have never come close to getting hit. But, let me drive to Jackson and all of a sudden I am a target of opportunity for some old boy who has no business hitting a 2-iron.
It drove my mother safely and comfortably between here and Conway a hundred times. It took me to the funerals of my beloved Aunt Jean and Uncle Bill. It kept me and the little boy's brother out of a ditch one Christmas. Of course, the fact that it was a rear wheel drive vehicle is what damn near put us in the ditch in the first place. Which is another reason to make a change.
It has been a good safe rig. But it is time for a change. I can no longer justify driving such a big vehicle.
Besides, there's nobody around here anymore that needs siderails.
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