My car stands out in the GE parking lot here in Raleigh.  It’s a Key West kind of vehicle.  Amid row upon gleaming row of well manicured Lexuses, BMWs, sport utility vehicles, gas-guzzling Explorers and Caravans ... and here and there a mere Honda or Toyota ... sits my battered 1986 Grand Am.  Gets pretty good gas mileage, gets me to work on time. 

Today it's the pollenmobile.  The pollen's particularly thick in North Carolina this year, and it sticks to my car and turns large chunks of it, especially the hood, a sickly lime green.  I guess it wouldn't do that if the subtropical sun in Key West, where I used to live, hadn't ruined the poor vehicle's cheap repaint job.  Just burned most of the finish right off the hood, roof, and trunk.  Oh well. 

So I drive the pollenmobile, the clunker with the ruined finish.  But what may be the object of ridicule for some coworkers is a veritable time machine for me.  My car, besides running as well as anything I've ever driven, has other charms.  It reminds me of where I've been and — when it gets me to work each day — of all I really need, rather than my imagined wants.  In its appearance and in my driving it, we send a message. 

Sometimes I get out of the old girl in the morning and look at the dented driver's side rear fender, and think, parking lot, Harris Teeter supermarket.  I don't think of it as a blemish so much as a way to distinguish my car from the others in the lot.  It'd cost as much to repair as the car is worth, and besides, I can always pick my auto out in a crowd. 

And when I get gasoline, I pop open the gas cover on the passenger side and the scratches on that rear fender remind me of the old tree that scraped my fender when I first got to Key West years ago.  I remember the sun that day, I remember my vain attempts to cover the scratch with primer and store-bought paint — still evident today — and I remember that the tree was removed two weeks later.  A classic case of bad timing perhaps, but what fine memories. 

The Key West heat and humidity also caused the covering on the inside roof to come loose.  I tacked it up with straight pins.  Occasionally, they come loose, and I spend part of my pre-work drive sticking them in so the fabric doesn't blouse out like a parachute.  The radio works when it wants to — about once a month — and shorts out altogether if it's rainy.  The tape player works fine, if you don't mind the volume going up and down, alternately unhearable and scaring the bejesus out of you with its ferocity.  And water leaks into the floorboards during a heavy rain. 

The radio situation has worked to my advantage.  I listen to much better music than when the FM band was operative, although the varying volume levels can be a little disconcerting.  Tapes and — since I bought a CD player with a car adapter — CDs ... various types of music.  Because the car is such a wreck, I don't feel guilty when I don't wash it.  And, as I said, it runs great. 
 

All the memories aren't great.  I got the car during my first marriage.  When we split and divided our meager property, I got the car.  And with the auto being the biggest piece of real estate either of us had, it meant she got a lot of property in return — for instance, virtually every stick of furniture we had. 

But even that was good.  I bought used furniture and found it as adequate for my needs as the shiny new furniture my ex-wife now owned.  And when my crippling alimony payments began, I learned to live on less, and more simply.  It started me on a path that continues today — one of consciously trying to live life on my terms. 

Sometimes that's hard.  After my second wife and I separated recently, I spent some time listening to friends and coworkers tell me, essentially, that I was unhappy.  "You need to find a woman," they'd say.  They were concerned that, with few friends in the area, I spent much of my time alone.  They were baffled that I remained close with my estranged wife, even helping her financially. 

I listened to their litanies of concern and almost began giving in to despair.  But thanks in part to a new interest in and practice of Buddhist principles, loving, nurturing principles, I continued my introspection.  And one day, I realized that I didn't feel concern.  I was happy!  Driving the old car and caring for someone I "should" despise and being alone and practicing some weird Eastern religion may strike some people as odd.  But they work for me.  I'm not materialistic, I am becoming more spiritual, and the old car — with a fine engine in a decaying body — is a symbol to me of my priorities and beliefs.  I love my car for the good things it represents. 

Finding the beauties in our limitations and imperfections is part of a loving lifestyle.  The alimony payments that have helped made a new car impractical for me have taught me acceptance and patience.  Severe vision loss in one eye has led me to be thankful for the sight I have left. 

Finding you can be satisfied with less, that you don't need  the new car or furniture, is a lesson that my fellow employees — as a Raleigh News & Observer writer put it, "affluent, spoiled people in early middle age" — have yet to learn.  They think that, like them, I want a big house, a dog, a new car, a wife and children.  And if those things come in the future, well, I'll be happy with them.  But I realize that God has given me my writing, a good job, decent health, books to read, and lots of other rewards. 

Yes, in a lot of ways, my car is a Key West kind of car.  It’d be a conch cruiser, and nobody would think twice about it.  Key West, for its flaws, is about acceptance.  Here, the people I work with continue to aim the wrecking ball at my life priorities and choices ... even as they complain incessantly about their own jobs and marriages.  They will continue to bash my old car, as if it needs additional damage. 

And that's OK.  The Grand Am gets me to work.  Better yet, it gets me home.  And many times, when I see that sunburned paint job, it takes me all the way back to Key West. 

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