To Tinker or To Tow?
In my driveway, there is a rusted up clunker—an eyesore that is so ancient that the last tarp I demanded to be purchased actually disintegrated (along with parts of the damn car). It is my husband’s other love, aside from myself and our daughter, so you might think that I’m jealous of the thing. I’m actually not; I know how much he loves to tinker and I encourage him to do it whenever he has a spare moment. He had a wonderful time beneath the thing Monday while I made dinner and burned my hand, for example.
What I can’t stand is how much of an expensive hobby it is. It’s a rich man hobby, and he is no rich man—at least, not when it comes to money. It’s true that it’s his money and he saves it (from, say, Christmas or birthdays or tax returns) and uses it in chunks to purchase things for the car (while I tend to spend mine right away on books or lotion or socks), but I can’t help but look at those chunks and wish we’d use them in our meager savings account instead. We want our own house so badly, but after both of our layoffs in 2008 and 2011 we are in a much weaker place to make that happen. Currently we live with an elderly relative to help care for her and the house she lives in, but we would love to live somewhere with neighbors we like, a little more space for chickens (we legally don’t have enough where we are, though we could comfortably have a few in our backyard), and simply a place to call our own. Isn’t that what everyone dreams of?
The car—a Cutlass Supreme that is, oh, forty or fifty years old, I suppose—is just a big money sinkhole to me. Not only are gas prices going up while it will surely suck up fuel like a newborn; it also needs every new part you can pretty much imagine, including body work. He’s had it for years—it was his father’s first, which is probably another reason I’m not too keen on it—but we’ve never had the budget for him to really fix it up. And now that he’s saved enough to start buying something here and there, I feel that old green resentment monster rising up within me once more.
I just have to remind myself that he tolerates my book obsession, my need to call my mother on a daily basis, my unschooling and crazy co-op classes filling our house with children and my loud Motown music. I think I can tolerate that rusted up bucket of junk—I mean, his hobby!—since the rest of him is so great.