Cars & Banks

Yesterday was a holiday. It consisted of driving around and getting estimates on repairs to front CV joints, followed with an afternoon at the banking establishments.

The VW I drive is one of those with the disappearing engine oil. When purchased, it used natural engine oil, derived from hydrocarbons forcibly sucked from the ground. A few years later, VW had the bright idea to alert its happy customers that synthetics was the way to go; synthetic oil in the engine...if you know what's good for you.

Of course, disappearing oil, annoying as it is, is a problem one can live with, support groups are available and one can live a normal life nowadays. However, when the oil "disappears" without a trace of burning or leakage and the oil pressure gauge does not really feel like doing its job, preferring to leave the matter to the Major Alarum System, then you are in peril on the highway.

The Major Alarum System essentially is Christopher Plummer saying "Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!", accompanied by a laser display on the dashboard and a ringing of church bells, a clashing of steel, a neighing of horses, and subliminal images of peasants running on the Odessa steps.

It was designed to get your attention.

In 2007, She-who-must-be-obeyed and myself were driving on historic route 40 through southeastern Pennsylvania when the sirens went off. I looked quickly around for the mushroom cloud, quite sure it was old Conelrad itself on the crystal set, keening us to an untimely death just outside Uniontown, but it was only Major Alarum...or Major Alarm, if you prefer.

I followed the directions and pulled over and stopped the engine. I looked at the engine, checked the oil level, since the disappearing oil was the only known idiosyncrasy of the beastly automobile...at that time.

Everything was fine.

I started up again. The alarms sounded again. This time the digital display added, "...and we aren't kidding!"

We had passed the Mount Summit Inn about a mile past. We were in those lovely piles of rock that are the foothills of the Appalachians. It would be downhill for a mile or so, but if it were the oil that was the problem, cars can be driven without any oil at all for a bit; not too far, but far enough, and certainly a mile or two was feasible.

We debouched at the Summit, an historic conglomeration which had hosted Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and that treesy-birdy-woodsy guy they used to hang around with.It was a Saturday afternoon in spring and the trees and flora were the color of 2:00 PM.

The next day was the feast of All Mothers. As a rule, not only do businesses close at noon on Saturdays, but people seem to be distinctly preoccupied when the really big holidays come lumbering up the bulwarks at them. The nearest VW dealer was 50 miles away, thus requiring a tow over that distance, leaving the car in their lot without having spoken to anyone, and the hope that they could do something quickly come Monday morning and the working class returned from their Mothers' Day bacchanalia.

Not only did these events conspire against us, but upon inquiring for the names of local mechanics, we received good references for a number of fellows named Zeke, Charlie, and Bubba.

Now their names did not pose a problem. Zeke, in particular, I found to be charming. The problem was that most of these fellows not only were closed for the day, and were getting ready for a big "do" for the old lady on Mothers' Day, and were full up with work for 3 or 4 days already, but to a man they said that working on "them furrin" cars was tough: hard to get parts shipped over from Germany on tramp steamers and all that.

Now I thought, O.K., valid point maybe 40 years ago. Land O'Goshen, foreigners have been selling and manufacturing cars here for a spell now, and it really shouldn't be all that difficult.

I mean, now look, Zeke, I have stood beside your counterparts all over the bloody world, cursing the fiendish designs of American automakers, who have incorporated so many computers and chips on a car that the common man can no longer even do a basic tune-up.

So you are telling me that autos made by outlanders are beyond your abilities?

This was dodgy.

It was not a good omen.

Then, suddenly, a young lady said, "Did you try Joe yet?"

I said no. No Joe.

"He's good."

Good references. Not Angie's List, but from the heart. The young lady looked up the number, and I pounced on the phone.

Now it turns out that this Joe character had a repair shop called not "Joe's Auto Repair", nor even called "Joe's Foreign Car Repair". It was "Joe's GERMAN Car Repair"!

Not only that, but Matt, the fellow that gave me a ride back and forth, was a sort of a VW super geek-expert-knower-of-trivia, who filled the brief rides with a fully catalogued description of the ailments of VWs, with special reference to his 1991 model, which he had bought recently and was still purring along well.

It was the oil. The dealer had not used synthetic oil, sludge had built up, clogging the oil filter, denying the flow of oil to the oil pump...sort of a Domino Effect thingie that we are now so familiar with...or a Cascade Effect...and Avalanche comes to mind, too.

I felt braced to the extreme.

They fixed it Monday. They charged me 1/10 of what it would cost in the big city.

The Summit had let us stay for 1/2 price, feeling sorry for our plight.

There were no limos, nor taxis, nor any other form of transit. We had been stuck at the Summit Inn, not even being able to go 15 miles or so to see Wright's "Falling Water" nearby.

It was a good couple of days.

We hiked and enjoyed the scenery from the hills. The Mount Summit had a golf course, where some ancient rusts stood apart, remnants of the skiing boom just after World War II; before everyone went to Aspen and Vail; a sieur de Malatroit's door to the enchantment of times gone by and our oblivion of them; history of small things and small joys and the ways of mankind.

I loved it.

She-who-must-be-obeyed had formed an opinion somewhat opposite.

She called Phyllida Erskine-Brown to bewail our plight, while I talked with the people working there and learned a bit of the history. I wandered through old rooms and corridors and gazed at old posters and maps of the glory days of the Inn.

Of course, we both had an eerie sentiment of The Overlook when we went to bed, but we did stay out of room 1409, so all was good. I did write a post card to my friend, Michael, saying "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", written about 20 times, filling the blanks and scootching around the corners and margins of the card, until it looked like a mad calligraphy of Tamerlane's heirs So, having finished with the VW, now to the banks.

Of course, She-who-etc. says that I flirt too much with the ladies in the banks. Only the ladies from Delhi at our branch of Bank-too-big-to-fail seem resistant to my charms.

At one bank, a young lady and I whiled the time chatting in Arabic about the election. I said that I was voting Republican, because I just could not get enough of it. Eight years wasn't enough for me.

Of course, she broke out laughing, and so on.

At another, a young lady bank employee and I spoke of poetry and T.S.Eliot. I informed her that the line as actually written by Tommy himself was "...ends not with a bang, but a whimbrel." instead of the now usual "whimper" (sic), a whimbrel being a smallish curlew native to Europe to which Eliot took a fancy after he emigrated.

The grand tour of 3 banks took about 3 hours. Some cried at my withdrawals, so we had to sweeten things with checking deposits. Much lamentation about things in general, and the destruction of the Temple.

Times are tough.

I found that when I was gloom and doom for 2 years, everyone else was magna cum upbeat about stuff. Once Wall Street slipped on that banana peel that had been patiently laying there, and finally gotten that cream pie in the face, I felt more upbeat, but now everyone else has changed sides to pessimism.

Oh, well. It is their right to wallow in the slough of despond for awhile. I had had dibs on it for too long.