One of the great perks Peg gets with these locums gigs is a rental car for the duration of the assignment. It's a chance to test drive a different sled every few weeks. P says she trades them at the rental car counter when they get dirty, which if you know her you'll realize is completely plausible.
Today we bid farewell to my favorite of the lot, a Cadillac CSX.
That's us loading up the tree a few days ago. She's a beauty, isn't she? The car's sort of nice too.
Our first ride when we arrived here in October was a Nissan Pathfinder. Here we are unloading at the Solarium on the day of our arrival.
We had some fun times in that car, learning the neighborhood, stopping into a couple wineries, and watching the leaves change as we drove laps around the Finger Lakes. It suited my plebian tastes just fine; P's less so.
"This thing sure rides rough. It's almost like a truck," she complained, forgetting that my usual means of conveyance back on the farm is a Dodge Ram that rides exactly like a truck.
As soon as it turned cold enough to worry about snow and ice, maybe three weeks into this trip, P presented at the rental car counter demanding something with all-wheel drive. They rewarded her with the Caddy. The guys at National love P, maybe because her Tennessee lilt is such a novelty up here. When they delivered the Pathfinder right after we landed the Cardinal at ELM, they were practically tripping over each other in her glow. She's known this crew since she started coming up here nearly three years ago, and they've never forgotten her.
It's been a long, long time for me since Cadillacs were a regular part of my life. Our first, a 1977 Cadillac Seville, arrived in the driveway at our house on Wilson Avenue in Orange, California maybe a year into our time living in Southern California. The car represented a totem of my father's extraordinary rise to the top of his business at 35 years old, a Yalobusha County farm boy made good.
Dad loved that car, two-tone beige with a vinyl top and curb feelers wiggling from the fenders. I remember that it smelled like leather and prosperity inside, rather than spilled Cokes and long-forgotten Quarter Pounder fragments like Mom's Datsun 310.
Mom wanted nothing to do with luxury cars--she was in the midst of completing her education, a long-deferred goal she'd chipped away at for years. Her social crowd during those days was mostly comprised of the American Association of University Women. The AAUW didn't have much use for Cadillacs, a rolling embodiment of the low-brow bourgeoise.
Of course, my emotionally tone-deaf father missed the memo on that one, and in 1978 bought Mom a beautiful, chocolate brown 1979 Cadillac Fleetwood d'Elegance.
A real beauty, eh? Not to my mother, who by this time was finishing up her master's literally down at the end of our street at the University of Texas at Dallas. After a few months of letting Dad know she wasn't enamored with her GM tuna boat, he broke down and sold the Cadillac, replacing it with her choice, an Audi Fox that had been a dealer demo.
The Audi was an objectively terrible machine, with plastic door moldings that frequently came unclipped and had to be piled in the back seat. It smoked. It wheezed. I once drove it around the block with the parking brake engaged, but it was so underpowered I never really noticed until the odor of burning brakes caught up with us at a stop sign.
Unsurprisingly I guess, my parents divorced not long after the Audi appeared in the driveway. In the end, it all worked out for the best for both of them. Funny how an ill-advised car purchase for a spouse can serve as a harbinger for the impending death of a marriage, or maybe signal that it's already dead.
Being Dean's son, once I was on the cusp of making partner at the firm, I traded my well-worn Chevy S-10 pickup that had taken me through law school and brought home a car more in keeping with who I thought I was at that moment, a used 1994 Cadillac Seville.
The Seville didn't stay with us long, however, because I was going broke taking it to the dealer every few weeks to repair the endless parade of mechanical and electrical failures that hinted to why this cream puff was available at such a reasonable price. After a couple years of this, I traded the unreliable Cadillac for a spiffy new Ford Excursion, a beloved part of my life for the next fourteen years thereafter.
So eighteen years had passed since my last Caddy adventure when P brought home the CSX. I fell in love with the ride, the power, the heated seats and steering wheel. It was my magic carpet out of the solarium on weekends filled with adventures with P all over the state, from here to the Thousand Islands. We even took the kittens for a couple rides when they were too little to leave at the apartment. There was lots of laughter and music and hope in that little car on those days, and a deep feeling of gratitude that during this most difficult of seasons in our collective lifetimes, we two had paying work, the refuge of a beautiful venue and, well, this totally cool car.
But now this part of the journey draws to a close, and P will pull up a little later today in front of the Sinclaire House driving who knows what. The rental car guy called yesterday to let her know she needed to bring back the car so it could be detailed and sold, the beginning of a new adventure for us and for the CSX. And because I am a hopelessly sentimental sap, I watched it pull away in the darkness this morning, marking an end point and remembering what now feels like a carefree part of our time here, as the next pandemic wave flows over us and we dare not venture out into the spreading inferno of Covid.
But today is another day, and we'll welcome the arrival of the next chapter when P turns the key on whatever the nice folks at National have set aside for her this morning.
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