Textured walls (Austin, TX) are fun to touch

Between A and B is a Three-Toothed Mechanic Named Anna

I have incredibly good fortune where cars are concerned.

A friend once gave me her 1969 VW Bug when she and her boyfriend bought a new car. That little bug rumbled its way to De Anza College for 2 quarters before it finally retired itself with one final poof of non-regulated exhaust fumes, sputtering to a stop in front of my apartment building. I had transferred to San Jose State University (2 blocks from my house) by then, so all was good when the tow truck came to take it off my hands.

My current vehicle was similarly bequeathed. Three years ago, a friend of mine from Barnes & Noble told me his friend had bought a new car and was looking to gift his old one to a needy candidate.

So it was I came into the possession of a 1993 Suzuki Swift.

“Swift?” you say.

Never heard of it? Neither had I until I owned one. It looks exactly like a Geo Metro. The absolute tiny whiteness of it has earned it the name “Tic Tac,” and one of my coworkers’ favorite pastimes is making fun of its utterly ridiculous nature. (I like to think they’re just jealous).

Sure, it’s a deathtrap…a bloody mangled wreck just waiting to, begging to happen. But it gets me from A to B.

And it has no major structural problems.

There are, however, two functional problems with my Swift. The first is rather unfortunate because it happened at the hands of a friend who was trying to help. When I first obtained the car, it needed new brakes. This friend volunteered to help change them but in the process broke my door handle. So for the past 2 ½ years I’ve had to roll down the window and reach out to open the car from the outside when I get out. I don’t mind this; it actually gives me a humbling chuckle when I have to do it in front of people.

The real problem is that my car doesn’t idle. This means I have to put it in neutral at stops or it will stall.

At least that was the case until a month ago when I was rear-ended by a deranged holiday shopper near the mall. Miraculously, my rinky dink car showed no signs of damage on the outside. In fact, the only evidence that I had been hit (aside from the frighteningly loud crashing sound) was that my old school anti-theft radio (the kind you have to physically pull out of the console and take with you) flew out and landed in my lap.

But the best part of getting rear-ended was that it actually somehow fixed my idling problem. Now I can stop and sit at a red light for at least 2 minutes before the shaking begins and the car calls it quits.

Still, though, my car has begun to run poorly.

I thought an oil change would be a good idea. So I took the car to Jiffy Lube last week, where the young fellow taking down the car’s vital stats asked me questions that made me smirk in owner-sanctioned entertainment at the expense of my car.

“Suzuki Swift?” he asked. “Do you happen to know if that’s a 1.3 or 1.6 liter engine?”

I glanced at the back of the car, where stick-on numbers read “1.3”

“Um,” I said, knowing well that a 1.3 liter engine is just half a step above a moped, “I’m not sure. Do you think that 1.3 on the back means anything?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that would be 1.3.”

“Now,” he added, “this is your air filter. It’s black here, and that’s bad. It can affect your gas mileage.”

“Oh,” I said, “you mean I’ll no longer be getting 45 miles per gallon? That’s gonna suck.”

They replaced that for an added 13 bucks. The sad part was when the girl who rang me up explained the other service they’d performed.

“We checked your tire pressure,” she said, with thinly masked, well-deserved disdain for people like me. “You had some serious problems there.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. Your tires are supposed to be at 35 pounds. One was at 54, one at 43, one at 19, and one at 14.”

Ouch. Dad, if you’re reading this, don’t kill me. And I’ve sinced figured out that my average tire reading between the four of them was 32.5 pounds. Only 2.5 pounds off…not too shabby.

Anyway, the car’s been acting up all week, post-oil change, and today it stalled on the road and wouldn’t start again, leaving me to finally make use of my AAA membership.

My savior was a sparsely-toothed, contracted mechanic woman named Anna…boy did she know her stuff. She got me started and back on the road in about 10 minutes, adding that it would be a shame for me to have to pay the $10/mile it would have cost if she’d ended up having to tow me.

There are some honest mechanics out there, it seems.

But anyway, my fear is that I will—Anna or no Anna—be needing to invest in alternate transportation options soon. That’s a painful thought, mostly because I’m trying to save money right now and a car was not what I had in mind to spend it on.

Still, though, I do have good luck in this category. My most ambitious hope is that the Tic Tac will hold out for another 100K or so. But if the Swift decides to put itself to sleep, I’ll be prowling Craigslist for another piece of crap that oh-so-gracelessly traverses the space between A and B.

I just love a car with character.

The Best Day of Your Life

One of my main goals in teaching my English classes is simply to get students talking. If you’ve ever studied another language, you probably know that one of the most inhibiting factors of the learning process is experiencing the fear of making a mistake. And you will always make mistakes; as a result, many second language learners are afraid to even open their mouths.

In an attempt to slowly assuage this fear, I give my students a prompt at the beginning of each class—usually a question or something that starts like, “Tell me about a time when you…”—and we listen to each of them respond, English only (!).

The other day, my prompt was this: Tell me about the best day of your life.

This is clearly no casual thought to ponder, but, to my surprise, my students answered quickly and with much conviction.

Mohammad (a 60-year-old Iranian man) began by sharing that the best day of his life was the day the 10-year-long war between Iran and Iraq ended (he was still living in Iran at the time). He said there were parties in the streets, dancing, celebrating, tears of joy and relief—a weight lifted. Mohammad doesn’t drink, so he didn’t partake of the festivities in that sense. He simply relaxed quietly with his wife and let the idea of peace take hold.

Ruby spoke next. She said her best day was the day her brother gave her a balloon. She said that in her town in Mexico, children receive—in addition to little toys and trinkets—a balloon at Christmas time. She was saddened every year because her parents couldn’t afford toys, trinkets, or balloons. She always thought, ‘why not me?’ When her older brother was old enough to work outside the home (which probably means he was 12 or so), he bought her and her other siblings each a big balloon at Christmas. To hear her talk about it, to hear the absolute gratitude in her voice, you’d think he gave them each a vital organ.

Miguel’s best day was the day his parents contacted him—out of the blue—from Juarez, a border town near Texas. They didn’t live there, but they were passing through on their way to come visit him in the United States. He’d been living here for 16 years at the time and hadn’t seen them even once since. They called to tell him they were coming, and he heard from them once a day in the days that followed, as they drew nearer to Northern California: “We’re in Arizona now,” “We’re in Los Angeles,” “We’re on our way.” Miguel’s smile during the recounting of the story was priceless.

I found my students’ responses to be truly humbling. The best day of my life was probably my 25^th birthday, only because it happened to fall on the same day I realized a long-time goal of graduating from college. My family was in town for the commencement ceremony, and I was surrounded by lifelong friends as well as friends from my program. Yeah, that was a pretty damned good day.

But to me, it doesn't begin to compare. Many, many people have the goal of graduating from high school or college; millions of people do so every year.

Just imagine the kind of joy Mohammad must have felt to witness the end of a ten-year-long war. Just imagine! Ten years ago, I was just about to graduate from high school. The thought of all the years since having been spent in fear and anguish—with war as a thought to wake up and fall asleep to—is confounding.

The thought of a balloon gift bringing me the joy of a lifetime, the thought of not having seen my family for 16 years because I had to leave the country and slave away at minimum wage jobs (with the constant threat of deportation to worry about) to support them, these are things I am far from having the capacity to absorb. These are things that make me revere my students, who are now undertaking the difficult task of learning another language as adults.

I think they probably have no idea how much I admire their steadfastness and their courage. What really affects me is the fact that they never, ever complain. I see their lives as being full of struggles I’ve never been even close to experiencing and often wonder if I’d be able to handle. For them it’s just life, just the proverbial lemons that come with the territory, and they don't even think to stop and feel sorry for themselves because they’re too busy making lemonade. They are some of the most amazing people I'm fortunate enough to know.