Let's Bring It Back

More from Husband:

Here's a brain teaser for you... What do all of the following things have in common?

• 2 cigarette lighters
• shards of broken picture frame glass
• 2 sweaters
• a wool blanket
• an SAT prep textbook
• a thesaurus
• 4 dinosaur toys
• a broken skateboard
• tools
• some sort of action figure
  
• 3 or 4 empty coffee cups
• 2 cameras, 2 rolls of film
• $5 or so in change
• numerous CDs and jewel cases
• pens and pencils
• lots of paper trash

Yes, dear readers... all those things and more were inside the Altima when I got to my mom's house. And did I mention it was REALLY filthy. It was one of the most pathetic scenes I've ever witnessed. There's no telling how long some of the stuff had been in there, or why (broken glass? wha?)

And that wasn't all. One of the sun visors is missing, and the other is broken. The two front tires were very low. The oil was down about a quart and a half. A huge, gnarly mystery stain was on the passenger seat. On the back, the Nissan emblem and three of the letters in Altima are gone, so it just says "TIM". Which would be great, if my name were, say, Tim. There were stickers all over the inside and in the back window. Two of the wheel covers are missing, and a third is cracked. On startup, the engine sounded like it was being repeatedly punched in the gut. And then there was the paint, dirty and dull from the car being left out and never washed. (present tense has been used for things that are still on the to-do list)

And yet, somewhere underneath all that was the car that had been there since the beginning, that many years ago I had maintained with such care, and that because of a shrinking public transit network in Phoenix, and my youngest sibling going to college, would be mine again.

Let the restoration begin.