A friend of mine is looking to unload his wife’s SAAB 9-5. He asked me if I’d be interested, because I bought his old SAAB 9000 back in about 1993. He was upgrading to Vipers and Corvettes and Monster Trucks. (He had some kind of Larry Ellison thing going on, I think, but he didn’t have enough money for a MiG.)

I told him that I was a seminarian, not a televangelist, so I didn’t
have enough money for a SAAB, and yes, that’s a cheap shot. I’m sure
that some of them aren’t crooked. I _mean_, that _most_ of them probably aren’t. Look, that’s not what I want to talk about, so let’s table it, okay, and get back to the SAAB.

I really liked my old SAAB.

The A/C was shot, so you didn’t want to cross any burning deserts in it but apart from that it was a bona fide driving machine. I knew how to drive a stick, sort of, before I got it, but the SAAB showed me how much fun it could be to drive one.

Not to own one, though.

Can you say “money pit?”

It used to cost me $300 just to drive past the mechanic’s. Not that the car ever let me do that. It had a mind of its own and when it saw the dealer up ahead, it would swoop across three lanes of traffic and pull into its reserved bay there.

Then they’d have to order parts from Sweden or somewhere. I’d have to hitch rides with my wife for three days before they’d let me have it back.

But did I mind? No sir. Because the dealer had an unfair advantage. I’d get a ride down there to cough up a few C-notes, then poke along in traffic, slowly heading west so I could take the freeway home.

If you do “get directions” on Google Local from the dealer to my old house it picks the wrong route, the shortest path, which was slow all the way to the major arteries coming out of downtown, where it would go from slow to glacial. So instead you head west. It’s about two miles to Crawfordsville Rd., which was as slow as the arteries on the
east side.

But! the place where you merged and got stuck in traffic was at the Track.

Picture it. You’re in your car for the first time in what seems like a month and _now_ it’s running right again, and you go past the Track. The *Track*. And as you poke along for another couple of miles, your mind is going off in dangerous directions it really has no business going, and then WHAM you hit the on-ramp and finally a glorious upshift out of second and it’s open road — jam-packed with commuters, actually, but at least they’re _moving_–all the way home.

So what if it cost you a fortune?

(Does this remind anyone else of the song by Stephen Curtis Chapman?)