[continued from Part One]
The car in question is an Audi A4 Avant. Avant is what Audi calls a station wagon. Audi makes seductive cars. They are well-designed with respect to visuals and ergonomics. It feels good to look at the cars, it feels good to sit in the cars, and it feels good to drive them. They have interiors that are nicer than they should be for the money, keeping in mind that they aren’t cheap to begin with. They are quick enough to feel powerful and get good enough mileage to feel responsible.
Audi also has a reputation for being flaky with respect to quality control. The reputation is deserved. To wit, our car, which was using (burning) something like a quart of oil every five hundred miles by the time it was twelve thousand miles old. It ended up in the shop for ten days, where it had its piston rings replaced.
My wife and I grew up poor. Food stamps, government cheese, powdered milk. We made not very much money at all for the first twenty years we were together. Not having much money was perceived as a problem.
Since then, we’ve had some good fortune. We took advantage of the long housing boom to lever into and fix up and make profits on two houses and lever into a third that is all the house we would ever have wanted and more. And I’ve compromised myself and worked hard enough to make some money over the last few years.
Now that we have a little money, we have to find new problems. A good new problem, if you have a little money, is how you’re going to hang onto that money and avoid being poor again. Sooner or later, one of two things happens:
1. You become a Republican.
2. You remember that being poor, while suboptimal, isn’t so bad as long you can keep a roof over your head etc. And you’re a long way from being poor right now.
Either way, you need to find another good new problem.
Enter the entry-level luxury car. Despite what your prejudices may tell you, Audis and BMWs and Land Rovers serve a useful purpose on the planet. These finicky, seductive, and ultimately ridiculous vehicles give people with a little money something new and ultimately ridiculous to worry about. (If you have a lot of money…well, a car is not going to do it. You’ll have to buy a boat, or a plane perhaps.)
By the time this car left the shop and returned to our garage, it was clear that we won’t be keeping it beyond the expiration of its warranty. There are other things to worry about. The passing of time, the mounting responsibility of middle age, many other trivial matters of great importance. One must keep abreast of these things. You want to have regrets on your deathbed.
I do not, however, want to be the kind of person who passes along a lemon. The pointless angst of owning an entry-level luxury car serves its purpose, as noted, and I don’t believe in karma, but I have some self-respect, and selling someone a lemon is rude.
I had to be certain this vehicle (whatever future misfortune may befall it) was no longer burning, pardon me, USING oil. Which is how I came to drive the ‘family car’ to work every day, leaving my wife our ten-year-old Subaru Forester (total oil burned over ten years of ownership: zero quarts) to ferry our daughter to school and piano lessons and so on.
Which is how I came to listen to satellite radio every day for an hour or so, during my commute.
Which is how I came to find myself listening, actively, on a regular basis, on purpose, while alone, to the Grateful Dead.
[to be continued]