I need a new car. My car is older now, though if you saw it just after a washing and you were standing some slight distance from it you’d be forgiven for thinking that I have a very nice car. It looks nice in photos, that’s for sure. But when I turn the wheel the car clicks, which is a sound that I haven’t had a car make since I was 17 and my car was that gray Saab. That car clicked around corners as well, but things were different then so the clicking didn’t matter because when I turned the radio up the clicking stopped. My car clicks and I could have the click fixed, but it seems like the car is prepared to let something else start clicking or thumping or chirping once I fix the current click. That lake house you looked at has an ugly kitchen and the guest bedrooms are so small.
My car has been my car for several years, for long enough that it seems like I could use a newer one. I can’t buy a new one, because I don’t have that in me. I don’t have the stomach for new car prices, for the stickers in the windows, for the salesmen that think there’s nothing difficult about buying a new car for elevated sums of money. I don’t like the snack bars, the magazines, the modern coffee tables. I don’t like the way the deal doesn’t really start until you sit at the little formica desk and the salesman starts punching in the numbers, picking through the keyboard with his index fingers until he finds the right combination of numbers and letters. I don’t like it when he turns the screen to face me and the numbers look nothing like they did in the window. That lake house is expensive, because taxes and dues and sprinkler systems.
There are lots of cars on that lot, not just the ones in the showroom that look so wonderfully shiny. Years ago, I had a customer drive to a showing in a very white luxury sedan. The car was beautiful, but it was extremely white, and it had rained earlier that day and so his car was white with scatters of road dirt, like an abstract painting that I wouldn’t understand. We talked for a while about his white car, and after some time he admitted that he shouldn’t have bought a white sedan. In fact, he didn’t know why he’d ever buy a white sedan, except that he then resigned himself to the reason. It just looked stunning under those showroom lights. Indeed it must have, but in that driveway on that day that it had rained it just looked like a white car that needed to be washed. The lake house on a sunny summer afternoon when the water shimmered blue and the hydrangeas bloomed white couldn’t have looked more perfect if it tried.
There are cars to buy, but the car must be heavy because I’d like to gain the tax advantage from that heavier car. Needing a heavy car means the choices are limited, because a lighter car might be nice and it will treat tires with more respect but it won’t get me that deduction. Heavy cars are numerous, but I’ve been down the road of a fancy car and I see how the fancy cars wear after some time. That is to say they wear terribly, no matter what engineers we claim to be the best, no matter which country of origin has the finest craftsman, cars are cars and they break. When the expensive ones break because your warranty recently ran out, it no longer matters how nice the car looks after a wash, when the sun is low and the lights are on. So I’m on the hunt for a reasonably nice car that’s heavy, but not one that’s so nice that it’s going to break down and leave me on the side of some country road wishing for a car that favored function over form. You can find a lake house of superior style a long ways from the lake, or you can find one that’s sturdy and near, even if it isn’t all that sexy.
I’m looking for something that will get me from A to B, and won’t break somewhere between the span. But as I look I realize I don’t like cars anymore, or rather I have the same problem that I’ve always had of not liking the cars that I can afford, or liking cars that know I shouldn’t own. I should buy something, and soon, because winter is coming and the clicking won’t stop just because it’s cold. The clicking might even get worse, since it could progress from a click to a dreaded thump. Today I’ll think a bit about this process and about what I should do, and I’ll think about how my car search is like your lake house search, and how we’re both just trying to accomplish something that we’ve been thinking about for a long time.