Leah's Blog - Archived Entry

I love my car. She is a bright red volvo wagon, a scarlet Swedish brick, as trusty, dependable and comely as a big-boned barmaid. A ruby rectangular silhouette, a reinforced steel framed battle-axe, a broad-hipped reassuring matron that seems to say "why ever clean out your car when my trunk is so big?"

and now she is gone.

Pulling into Boston this weekend from a trip to Maine, she suddenly began shuddering, sputtering, and losing power. Not in the way she usually shudders, sputters and loses power. In a different way. In a way that made me know she would not make it home, and pray she could make it to my mechanic Jim at the Gulf Station around the block from my apartment. In the lot at the Gulf Station, I popped her beautiful, broad crimson hood and beheld a gruesome scene--oil sprayed all over the underside of the hood, dripping from the engine block, hissing from valves, pooling on the pavement. This being Sunday, the station was closed--so I left her parked there and slipped the key through the mail slot in the shop door as I do every few weeks when some obscure and expensive Swedish part of her breaks. No need to leave a note; Jim would call me in the morning.

I didn't hear from Jim until almost noon the next day. "I put off calling you for 3 hours," he began. My heart sank. "It's not good news." Apparently, she had leaks everywhere she had seals or valves, and they could be fixed, but the real problem was the engine--it was building up too much pressure, and would just bust the seals as fast as they could be fixed. "Age," was what Jim said. A new engine was also what Jim said. A repair that would cost more than what the car was worth.

So that sealed it. I was in a daze, muttering to Jim about how I'd walk down later that day and take her off the lot, when he asked "hey can I take one of those packets in your back seat?" What packets, I asked..."Those drive against Bush packets"--and herein lies the advantage of never ever cleaning out my car, that I had a stack of 30 Driving Votes press packets that had been there since a DNC press conference--"I got roped into my town's Democratic committee, and they wanna take a trip to New Hampshire. Last night I was up until 3 in the morning thinking about how that guy is running our country into the ground. Can we work with you guys?"

And so my car knew exactly what she was doing. With her last dying gasps, she made a desperate bid to ensure that her life would not be in vain, and the work of DV members she could no longer drive to swing states would continue unchecked through the work of one man who knew her far better than I ever could.

My mechanic is against you, George W. Bush. You have no chance. Because he can fix anything, and he's gonna fix your ass.