An Unreliable Ride
When I was in college in Houston, I drove a car that my dad had treated well and handed down to my wild younger sister who handed it down to me when she bought her own vehicle. Now, if I had gotten it straight from Dad, that would have been one thing. But inheriting the four-door Toyota Corolla Tercel from my beach-dwelling, party-hopping sibling was another thing altogether.
She had a bumper sticker that said, “A clean car is the sign of a sick mind.” The cassette player had long since died, a victim of sand from East Beach in Galveston and a heavy layer of Hawaiian Tropic deep tanning oil. And of course, the car was never the same after she wrecked it on the way to visit me in my dorm room freshman year.
So when I inherited the car, I had to make the most of it. I lived on the far east side of Houston, with my roommate whose family was from Louisiana and stayed as close to the Sabine River as they could and still be in the city. My job was 10 miles west, and my school was 10 more. The boyfriend didn’t have a car or a phone, and he lived as far north as you could get and still be in Houston city limits. This was fine, I put a lot of miles on the car during those years, and the boyfriend did some parking lot repairs to keep me rolling.
The last year was the worst, though. I moved way out to the west side; my job was still on the east side; school still downtown, and the boyfriend moved to Galveston County. But the real problem was that the car had started shaking violently at speeds over 45 mph, and me with no money to fix it.
I found roads I never knew existed to keep me off the freeway, but when I drove toward Galveston down I-45, I just stayed in the right-hand lane and waved as people passed. I just have to be thankful I lived in Houston. I’d have never gotten away with it in the Big D. Of course, I could have taken the bus.