I had been putting off service my 14 year old RAV-4. Last time I visited my Toyota Hollywood, they told me that there was some oil pan related thing that was in need of attention, really soon, that would cost $500.00. There would surely be more than that. Each visit for maintenance was costing me more. And registration, and the dreaded smog check was coming up. So, I began to think. Maybe a new car was in order, even if, as my friends are tired of hearing me say, "I've been spending money like water" lately, at a time when what is coming in isn't the same as what iused to be.
Now, that RAV 4, 1999, boxy, silver and exactly to my liking had been leased in October 1998 during one of the many whirlwind crisis at my job occasioned by the politics of lawyer regulation, the veto of the fee bill that kept regulators regulating. A few of us were left to blow on the embers of ethics enforcement, but it was also possible that since we had also been given provisional "pink slips" I'd be out pounding the pavement, which in Los Angeles is more like, "wheeling on the pavement", it being a car community. And I had an old car then, also a Toyota, a Corolla. I figured I better have something new, and already acquired for when I no longer had a job, so I could get a new one. Within weeks of this new shiny chick SUV coming into my life, a man backed into it while I was stopped and claimed against me, and on the same day, I was informed that a responding lawyer had put a contract out on my life.
Those crazy days passed. I concluded therapy about a year after the car. I stopped studying psychology. I put a new radio in so I could play CDs (this RAV had no player); I loved my arcane eight disc changer in the BACK of my RAV that I could operate from the controls up front. I exchanged that once again for a better system, and only one CD at a time, some years later. I repaired a dent I put in the side as I backed out of the parking space in dad's new condo, that is now mine. I left another dent I put in it as I avoided an improperly parked car in my back yard and hit the iron wrought stair handle. I had long ago stopped going to the CAR WASH on La Cienega where I once saw Jerry Stiller, and Adrian Paul (the TV version of the Highlander; actually he was in the furniture store next door) in favor of occasional hose downs on weekends. I lost my fear of being hit by people cutting me off (silly because my body was just as susceptible to damage as when the car was new) because I superstitioned that a dented car wouldn't likely be hit anymore. RAV and I, well, we kind of moved as one for all the years we spent together, and 102,000 plus miles. But the paint was peeling from its being parked in the sun. Time to say goodbye old friend.
I did not want to pay anything up front for something new. Len Speaks recommended we travel to Longo. No, it is not a far away fantasy land, but a car dealership, the largest, is it in California or the country, for Toyotas. And while I complained I did not like the new RAV's, the shape is not the simple and small of days gone by, I found myself enthralled by the bells and whistles of modern technology and the smooth ride.
And now, in that same parking space sits a Pacific Blue, Blue Tooth enabled, I Heart playing, grandson of RAV 1.
It's bigger and so I am nervous-er around that pole I hit with his predecessor, because I haven't quite become comfortable going in and out. But all is new in this old little world of mine.
I regret that my farewell to RAV 1 was little more than a wave, a see ya, not what was deserved for all the years of faithful service. So, I offer this little eulogy for work well done, for pleasant days on the road, several to San Francisco and back in the days when I was part of the legal ethics biz.
Alas, poor RAV, I knew him, a chariot of infinite zest, laid to his mechanical rest.
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