A Cavalier attitude toward my 1983 car
By Robert LaFrance
Believe it or not, there are still people who spend whole portions of their lives in being Politically Correct, so I will begin this column with my non-PC wish of a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to one and all.
I know, it’s insensitive to the Yodi ethnic dervishes of Kazachstan, and the Aberdeen Presbyterian Outlanders of San Marino, but there it is. We can’t please everyone.
There was a time, fifteen or twenty years ago, when saying ‘Merry Christmas!’ was considered almost as bad as the worst racial slur, but we seem to have gone past that, so here I am, saying ‘Merry Christmas’ to one and all. And I sure hope the year 2021 is a lot better than its predecessor. At least it will be, or should be, Trump-less.
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My high point of the year 2020 occurred on Monday, December 7, when my wife laughed at one of my jokes – an original joke at that. No plagiarism allowed here.
She was standing over by the microwave when I said: “I have just coined a new definition for an already existing word. Look at me.” I blessed her with a VERY quick hand wave, like instantaneous.
“That was a microwave,” I said.
She opined that apparently, because of the date, that was her Pearl Harbour. She never laughed again.
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I can’t get through a column without mentioning New Corona Virus COVID-19, so here it is: All through our lives we were told that being positive is a good thing; “be positive throughout your time on this green orb. So what if you just lost $12 billion in the stock market, be positive. Yes, somebody dragged a coin along the side of your Rolls Royce Silver Cloud and shot your favourite dog Rover, so what, be positive.”
You took a test to get your pilot’s licence and came out with a positive result. Yahoo. Your carpentry work drew positive comments from the homeowner and your proposal of marriage to your favourite girl drew a positive response. “YES!”
You go in for a COVID test that gets a positive result. Not the answer you wanted. Funny how words work.
Changing the subject a bit to buying a used car (that is quite a radical change, isn’t it?), I am remembering the time I bought a 1983 Chev Cavalier station wagon from Lenny Barnes of Tinker.
I don’t know why I absolutely had to have a station wagon, but I was positive. We had one child at the time, in the late 1980s, and we had a baby’s car seat from Hell that we used in our 1978 Plymouth Horizon so it was time we started trying to avoid killing all of us. New car seat.
It was a good looking car, that Chev Cavalier, but there was one minor problem: its toxicity level was 9.7 on the Menier-Sockwer Scale. It was the car that Lenny used for his own errands and he smoked cigars, and I mean he smoked cigars. Remember that smokestack/furnace that used to be in Stickney? The one that would knock a cat off a gut-cart? Compare Lenny’s cigar smoke with that Stickney smoke and the latter would be like a small birthday candle.
I happened to be driving in the Tinker area, near the dam, one day when I saw Lenny’s sign and saw that station wagon that I just had to have. I turned around and stopped in to see the car and Lenny, who urged me to take the car out for a spin. I got in, started the car and rolled up the windows. It was a cool day.
It was a near thing. I coughed, hacked and nearly passed out from the cigar smoke that was clinging to every inch of the car. Rolling down the windows, I managed to take it for a spin over to the dam and back. Except for that slight problem that affected the olfactory senses (my nose and associated cilia and sinus cavities) it was a good car, and Lenny wanted to get rid of it – badly.
He was asking $2800 and I am not kidding, he finally relented and sold it to me for $1950, cigar smoke free. I gave him a cheque from one of my many accounts and was on my way home to Kincardine. My wife could come up the next day and bring home the Horizon.
“Find a way to get up there,” I said, “because I refuse to drive that Cavalier until it gets a good airing.” With the baby in her arms, she started hitch-hiking. I parked the Cavalier in the back yard, lowered all the windows, and let it sit there for three days. Luckily, it didn’t rain and there was lots of wind all that time. At the end of three days it was almost driveable.
A prologue to that story: That car was one of the best secondhand vehicles I have ever owned. We kept it until our third baby arrived and we had very few misadventures with it except that about 1990 it needed a paint job and my elder daughter and I painted it (with a brush) a fiery crimson colour.
Oh, and one other thing: due to a crossing of signals between my wife and me, we put 17,776 kilometres on one oil change. Like the faithful Model T Ford of the 1920s and 1930s, it just kept purring. I sold it for $400 in 1992 to an older gent (as I remember him; he was five years younger than I am right now) who soon drove it into a concrete abutment near the Johnville Roman Catholic Church. -end-
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