Retirement is about discovery. It is a slow-paced,
shuffle-stepped, hunch-shouldered plod to the realization of what you are, in
reality, too old to do … whether you believe it or not. Soon we will purchase
the last vehicles that we will ever own. We am not counting power scooters for
we will go through several of them and probably will wreck one or two on the
highway where they should not be. Naturally, we will be indignant and say we
pay taxes and that the roads are just as much ours as those little speed-freak
shits. We will defy the world sitting on our butts with little triangular flags waving over our heads.
We rented a car while we were visiting Charleston. I know
now that I should have flown down a day earlier. We should have spent the first
day of our trip figuring out how to drive a different car.
We are not “with it”.
We are not in “SYNC”.
I started by carefully examining the outside of the rental
for scratches that the company would try to blame on me later. I finally found
one and demanded they make a note of it on the rental agreement. When they
looked away, I snapped a quick picture of it … just in case. They described the
scratch as normal wear and tear. SURE THING!
I initialed the rental agreement in four places to verify
that I had rejected the four levels of add-on insurance coverage being offered
in print too small for old eyes to read … in a language that has no country …
so voluminous that I did not have sufficient years to read it all. I had called
my insurance company prior to the trip, but I think secretly they are in on it.
I had called two credit card companies. Everyone says “Don’t buy it, we got you
covered”. I know this is not really
true, but it is what I want to believe. Somewhere in the fine print, written in
the secret language, it will say it. If we are lucky, we will be more damaged
than the car and will never know about the damage charges.
I did not realize that we had rented a 747 … compact of
course … until I sat down to drive away.
I looked around the cockpit and the hundreds of dial and buttons, none
of which seemed to have anything to do with driving a car, stared back at me.
My mouth dropped open. I recognized one familiar sight and slid the key in it. Immediately, bells sounded and light flashed
and blinked. Messages scrolled across a marque too rapid for me to catch. From
deep within the cockpit dashboard, a voice thundered, “Voice activated. Speak
command.” I never discovered the source of the voices (maybe they were in my
head all along), but I did verify that “Shut up” was not the command they were seeking. In desperation, I cranked and shifted into
reverse to back out. Bells chimed and the marquee verified that the backup
assistance was indeed activated. With
some effort, I found a dial that seemed to control the lights. There were five
settings, none of which said “Off”, or “On”.
It was a crapshoot. Later that night, I would discover that my choice
was one that did not allow me to turn on the high beams. We read an interesting
story in the manual about how the car decides when high beams are needed and
takes care of that for you. Obviously, whoever wrote the manual does not have
old eyes and does not realize that the reason we eat dinner at 5:30PM is that
we cannot see to drive home at 6:30PM.
We muddled through with some success by driving a la carte
and ignoring the menus. That is, until we decided to listen to the radio. We
pressed the radio button and all hell broke through on the dashboard. Lights
were flashing, text was scrolling, our hidden passenger was mumbling … but the
radio was not playing. We broke out the manual from the glove compartment and
enrolled in a 3-credit college course on Computer Programming and Einstein’s
Theory of Relativity. After an hour of intense study and no music, we agreed to
converse instead, which means we fumed and fussed about the damn radio. We
realized that only people with blue teeth could listen to music in this
vehicle. We pressed the SYNC button anyway just in case it was disco the disco
music station, but it didn’t seem to be.
By the time, we pulled into the driveway that night, we had
decided that automobiles had left us standing in the dust. We opened the doors
to get out and just to assure us that we had made the right decision, none of
the interior lights came on in the car. We soon gave up on finding them.
One more car should take us to the grave.
And it will be a used one.
