Apart from babies, the main thing that the girls are obsessed with at the moment is the car (‘dar’ in two-year-old speak). It’s an old grey Volvo station wagon, not flash but sturdy, safe and just as you’d expect from a Volvo, consistently reliable. Rhea and Lara love scrambling around inside the car from the boot to the front seat, pretending to drive it, rummaging around the glove box and storage area for cassettes (yes, it’s a pre CD model) and pressing all the buttons they can reach on the dashboard. When I say they love it, I mean they Love it: their record is playing like this in the car for two-and-a-half hours. This is handy for Steve during the times he looks after the girls. Most public parks aren’t fenced, and in cold weather the indoor places to take children can be challenging to manage if they want to run off in different directions, as they still often do. If the car is the entertainment rather than the means of reaching the entertainment it is self-contained, safe (when stationary) and also free. That’s a pretty appealing combination for us too.
As well as being for playing in and a means of transport, we have a third use for our car as well: we usually sleep the girls in it during the day. You might think this is strange, but it beats doing battle against two defiant toddlers who have no intention of lying down in their cots in the middle of the day no matter how tired they are or how appealing their cosy beds. A half-hour screaming, crying battle or a quick drive around the neighbourhood or better still, timing the drive with a return trip during their sleep time. Which one would you chose?
All this is a roundabout way of saying that since having children and without us really realising it, the car has definitely increased its prominence in our lives. So when I was involved in my first car accident the other week, and the car was taken off us permanently and suddenly, the immediate impact affected more than our means of transport.
The accident itself was a minor one in the spectrum of car accidents: a P-plater didn’t see our grey car at dusk on a grey day so hit our front left-hand corner at a ‘give way’ sign when the girls and I were two blocks from home. The impact was like being in a dodgem car at the Show. The girls were already in a tired, giggly mood and thought it uproariously funny when our cars made contact. They weren’t hurt and neither was I; in fact my immediate reaction was annoyance and disbelief rather than fear. I don’t know whether the girls connected the experience with the mangled bonnet and front light the next day when they correctly diagnosed the car as ‘broken.’
We had one last sleep in the car the next day while it sat stationary in the driveway with the engine running, we had a last picnic in it then stripped it of most of our possessions before waving it goodbye in the tow-truck.
Our car, which has served us so well over the past few years, and our larger family for the past twenty years, was written off by the insurer a week later. It would be worth more than the value of the car to repair it.
The loss was sudden and my sorrow over it was unexpected. We had anticipated that one day it would have a major problem and had agreed that we would retire it at that point, but we hadn’t anticipated that day to come so soon. The fact was that I wasn’t ready to give it up.
Could we perhaps spend our own money on top of the insurance payout to get the car repaired? The accident wasn’t my fault – couldn’t I insist that the car be returned to its pre-accident state, regardless of cost? Unfortunately the answer to both questions was no. The car wasn’t worth the investment, and insurance doesn’t work like that. With financial help from Steve’s parents, we hired a ‘special dar’ to cover the gap while we explored our options.
I discovered a lot about cars in a very short space of time, learning to rate value for money from the price, mileage and age at a glance and becoming familiar with a range of brands that I had no consciousness of only a matter of days previously. On Friday we bought a second-hand car that is only 5 years old. It is worth a lot more than the $4,000 we will receive for our old car. Given the accident we had, you won’t be surprised that I would have preferred to buy a red or other brightly-coloured car. It is ‘carbon’ grey. That’s what was available. And the brand? It’s a Mazda.
And so the end of our Volvo era – for a couple of decades I hope, anyway. I’ll keep all the memories we have in the Volvo: of bringing home two tiny babies in it on a crisp, clear winter’s day two weeks after they were born; holidays in the Big Smoke and at our favourite beach houses; long drives to get there, me sitting between the girls in the back seat entertaining them the whole way; all the toys, bits of paper, food scraps and abandoned takeaway coffee cups that covered the back seat and often the front seat too; and cassettes (Gilbert and Sullivan, the Pearl Fishers) that we used to listen to in those same long drives of my childhood, which still worked.
We’ll build new memories in our new car. Steve thinks we’ll ‘wipe the slate clean’ and keep it clean and tidy. I think we’ll rub off the newness with grubby fingerprints on the windows, bits of dried up mandarin peel between the crevices and no doubt just as many layers of mess that will change in character as the girls grow older.
In the meantime R.I.P old faithful, and thank you for your long years of service.
