Ode to the Island Car

Oh, poor ol Red Bird. She sits soggy and waterlogged under a sagging car cover- rained out for 10 straight days. Colin is back to singin his tired 'ol ditty: "Oh, I need a garage, my last garage left me for another owner....pooooor me, poooor meeeee" Same song, different day. Those long, agonizing couple of days spent spittin out swear words and battling a hand-in-a-vice-grip pain to get the windsheilds installed was well worth it...no leaks! Locked up in all this crawling-the-walls rain, I embarked on another fabulous winter task: tax preparation. Right up there with child birth and cleaning up cat barf, this was not something I looked forward to. I half-heartedly dug through the stacks of papers we had squirreled away in closets and on the top of counters. The electronic babysitter was blaring Spongebob Squarepants for the 9th time, and I needed to just get this done. Furiously looking for W2's and 1099's, my mood was careening rapidly downhill. In the myriad of junk mail, pictures the kids brought home from school that I couldn't throw away and other documents I swore I would take to the shredder but never did, I found this picture. Just randomly stuck on the back of a State Farm Insurance calendar from that soul sucking year that was 2009. This picture caused me to sit down on living room floor, criss-cross applesauce style, the heaps of papers and file boxes around me forgotten. I just stared at for it for a while.

I bought this car while I was living in the Caribbean after I promised my dad I would stop hitchhiking to get to where I needed to go. Most days I was out on a charter boat working as a cook, so I didn't think I needed a car. Hitchhiking was very common, but my parents didn't like the idea. And it got be a real pain in the ass on laundry day anyway. Staring at this picture, I got lost in the memory of days that were spent shoeless in shorts and a bathing suit top where the biggest decision I made on my days off were weather to go diving or read. I could leave the key in the ignition when I parked, often for days, and no one would bother it. It could get dumped on in a surprise tropical downpour, shake it off like wet dog and start right up. Off charter, nights out consisted of stopping at a roadside stand for conch fritters and an ice cold Heineken. We'd play Trivial Pursuit at the Pub or just sit in a chair, feet up on a rope railing and stare at the sea playing backgammon. My salary went right in my pocket in the form of wadded up cash tips, and I spent it on new bathing suits or dive gear. I did get a marine plywood top made for this car by the guy that was the previous owner. He owned a windsurfing place on the east end of the island and was a little cantankerous. He marketed himself as being sort of a craftsman, and touted his side job of outfitting these tops for many of the roof-less island cars. After a particularly difficult charter babysitting a bunch of airline pilots from Buffalo that REALLY liked to drink, I decided to spend some of my hard-earned money on a new roof for my little car. What this "so-called craftsman" made was something akin to what my five year old would construct. It was a giant box with a big slice in the top to flip back to make a sort of sun roof. He seemed pleased with himself, but I was horrified. It didn't even appear to look like it would stay on when I started driving. But he was a crabby old English guy that kind of scared me, so I said nothing, plunked down the cash and started down the road. If I went faster than about 15 miles an hour (which is about as fast as I could go in that car anyway) the top halfway opened and closed intermittently. Surely I looked like some sort of motorized Venus fly trap. I got used to the thud, thud, thud as I drove - and most days just flipped it back and avoided the sound altogether. This car was actually considered an SUV by Gurgel, the Brazilian company that manufactured it. When Gurgel first started manufacturing cars in the early 1970's, they would plop their Fiberglass bodies on a VW beetle chassis, so they were pretty popular in their time. Sadly, Gurgel went out of business in the 1990's when Brazil opened up their car market to foreign cars -if that ol car if it isn't a wreck dive by now it is someones collectors item. But this little trip down memory lane was a nice diversion in the middle of a cold January day. Reminiscing about my life when I swam in the clear blue sea multiple times a day and could decide last minute to eat fresh lobster, well, cause there is a kid that just tied up his dinghy full of fresh lobster. My life back then was a lot like our little Red Bird: the opposite of complicated. No GPS, no crazy bells or whistles. No bigger, better, faster. Just a pretty little car that you unlock with an actual key, start with an actual key and the only thing to fiddle with is the clock when the time changes. There is a lot to be said for nice, easy and uncomplicated. By the way, we are collecting more o that, if anyone's got it...