Member-only story
Car Maintenance
Unexpected Victims of the Pandemic
Have you been looking after your car’s health during lockdown?
It’s not like I haven’t gone anywhere. I have run errands; I have driven about 10 miles each week to get groceries and the occasional home-improvement do-dad or gardening thingy at Ace Hardware. But Thursday morning, last week, my car was harder to wake up than I am after an all-nighter on Kindle and no coffee in my cup.
I wasn’t exactly surprised that the battery was dead. I was a little surprised at how hard it was to start. And more than a little annoyed at my husband’s suggestion that I take it out for a run, as if it were a Belgian Malinois on a skateboard.
People are not driving as well as they did before lockdown. And that’s not saying they were any good at it before, but they’re worse now. I don’t feel “cooped up” at home, as long as I have a good book. I feel like I’m locked and loaded for the Zombie Apocalypse, whenever I have to leave the house. Mask? Check. I know that you can tell if my smile’s not reaching my eyes, but it usually is. I need to paint a mean, nasty, unapproachable, “stay-six-feet-away-from-me” face on the mask, when I’m feeling more creative.
I drove up and down 99. When they first opened that stretch of exorbitantly priced…
