Car and gun

A car and a gun.

How much is a car wrapped up with your own identity?

It’s like as long as I don’t have a car here in suburbia, I don’t really live here.
I am invisible.

And my days are rich~I stay home. I walk. I plan around the absence of car.

But this year, soon, I know I will need the wider world, to look for work, to visit friends and family, to not be such a bum who has to borrow my mate’s car in inclement weather or for large shopping trips or to haul the ninety pound tornado we call our dog.

I have loved all my cars like they were people or horses.

I do not take entering into car ownership again lightly. It’s not just the love and loyalty and the loss, and it isn’t just the harrowing moments in recent years, like when the brakes failed going down a hill in rural Maryland. Or when the car lost all power and started on fire and had to be put out by three firemen on a busy road near Freehold, New Jersey. (Rest In Peace Green Seahorse Honda.) Or when a rock smashed out my side window as I was driving 60 miles an hour on 1-5 in Seattle on the way to the funeral home.

It’s that driving here is risky business.
Driving puts me back in the food chain of New Jersey.

So I call the insurance company for a quote and Jack says to me, “Don’t be shocked. NJ has the second highest rates in the country. We just gave up first place to DC.”

“Yes.” I say, “It is a cultural difference, the way people drive here. There is that issue of no left turns. And I have so often been honked at to take that right turn on red where it is so clearly posted not to.”

“Yes,” Jack says, “a cultural difference that everyone expects you to go along with! Here everyone is in a big hurry to go nowhere fast.”

We laugh and banter. And when I put down the phone I really question if this is the route I want to go. Do I really want to leave the house? Do I want to go nowhere fast?

I can hear the sound of buoys or foghorns in the water. I love this. It makes me want to walk to the river.

Last week I saw three swans silently swimming there in the silver waters of the Navesink.