"All shall be well, and all shall be well..."

I grew up without a car; living in San Francisco made it actually easier (and cheaper) not to have one.  I got my license around 1986, but didn't actually own/drive a car until 1988.  Even then, a car was just a car.  It got me where I needed to go.  I kept it fed and watered, and got it fixed when needed, but I didn't think much else about it.

However, since getting the Sentra in February, I've been much more fascinated with it than with any other car I've owned.  When I go out to the parking lot, I look at it and feel like I'm in love.  I think about driving it when I'm not.  And I actually get jealous when Martin takes it for the day.  It's not that it's only two years old; my other cars were about 2-3 years old when we got them.  I've never felt superior about having things before, so this really threw me for a loop.  It was very weird, and was actually getting embarrassing.

Then I suddenly figured it out.  For years, I've been telling myself that "things have GOT to get better", but they never did.  Every time we fixed something on the van, something else would go wrong with it very soon.  The bills mounted up and I had to scrounge to pay them.  My mom got worse and needed more care.  I was stuck in a job I didn't want.  Things never got better, we just exchanged one problem for another, and there always seemed to be two to three problems going on at once.

But this car is "something better".  Yes, we now have an extra $240 in car and insurance payments every month, but because I got what was left in my mom's accounts after her death, we are able to afford it. And everything works.  (Knock on wood!)  The A/C, the heater, the CD player, the radio, they all work.  I don't have to shift into neutral when stopping so that the transmission won't buck.  The seats aren't broken.  All the dashboard lights and the gas gauge work.  And the paint isn't peeling and chipping off because the primer and/or the paint was bad (all Plymouth Voyagers and Dodge Caravans built that year apparently got bad paint and/or primer, at least the white ones; there should have been a recall on the paint job).

So this car is actually a sort of talisman for me.  It's physical proof that things not only can get better, but they ARE getting better.  And I'm clinging to that so that I can deal with the other things that I'm still trying to fix.

And yesterday, I noticed that the auto-withdrawal from my checking account for my credit consolidation payment went from $581 (!) to just $17 (!!).  I think I'm DONE with it, woo-HOOO!!!  Which means that one more thing just got better.  So here is a happy Goth to help me celebrate:


 
                                                        (I'd love to credit this, but the name is cut off; I found it on Tumblr.)