When the COVID pandemic sent the Flyer staff home last year, we moved much of our work onto our Slack channels. The notes in the margins of printed-out pages, the style conversations that used to happen in the hallways all moved online. The jokes, too.
Which might help explain why someone posted a newspaper clipping about a woman who thought she had won a “brand-new Toyota” only to discover that she had, in fact, won a “toy Yoda.” You know, the little green Jedi master from Star Wars who speaks in disjointed sentences. Judging by her photo in the paper, the Yoda-winning woman was not at all impressed. I can’t say that I blame her.
There have been times in my life when I’ve been without a car, and it’s never been fun. A new Toyota would have erased a Hummer’s load of worries. In fact, up until about a week ago, I was carless — again.
When it became clear that we weren’t just going to be working from home for two to four weeks, I began to wonder if I needed the old hunk of junk parked outside my house. I wasn’t driving to work — or gigs or the radio station or to go rock climbing or to visit friends. Why pay insurance on an unreliable car I drove only once a week so that it wouldn’t forget how to turn on? So I sold it. One less thing to worry about, right?
Then, in a whirlwind of everything-hits-at-once, I was double-vaxxed and going into the office more or less daily. As editor, I want the Flyer folks to be able to stick their heads in my office and pitch me stories, ask me questions, or just gripe about what ails them. Suddenly, I needed a car again, but this time, I aimed to go about the whole process a little differently.
In years past, I followed the wisdom handed down by my dad: If you “buy” a car by taking out a loan, that’s not your car; it’s the bank’s. Sensible enough, right? So I would search the classifieds, always on the lookout for that rarest of creatures — an old, honest grandad who lived out in the middle of nowhere and was “gittin’ rid of” the Oldsmobile he’d only ever used to go to church and the grocery store.
Sometimes that system yielded wonderful results — cars bought cheap that weren’t much to look at but got me where I needed to go. Sometimes I ended up being the owner of a money pit in constant need of maintenance, with windows that fell off their track at inopportune times (on Walnut Grove in torrential rain, say) and never quite managed a waterproof seal, giving the car its own subtropic atmosphere, somehow more humid and warmer than even the wettest, hottest Memphis summer. Once I even bought a total lemon, a Saturn that lasted roughly two weeks. The body and interior were in perfect shape. The transmission was not. Luckily, I sold it to a used car salesman who specialized in Saturns, and I walked away (literally) with as much money as I’d put into it.
This time, though, I decided to ignore what, in my family, passes for conventional wisdom. On the advice of some close friends whose parents presumably didn’t take Polonius’ speech in Hamlet about lending and borrowing at face value, I took out an auto loan and bought a three-year-old (not 13-year-old, or 23-year-old, but three!) crossover that still isn’t much to look at but doesn’t develop its own interior nimbuses when it rains. It even has a working radio!
Imagine my surprise when our finance columnist, Gene Gard, this week listed an auto loan put toward reliable transportation as one of the few examples of “good debt.” One has to establish credit, after all, and those charming rural grandpas have never responded to my requests for verification of payments.
Sometimes it pays to take a risk on unconventional wisdom. It’s been worrisome to me that we have been in such a hurry to rush back to “normal,” whatever that means. In the last year, we’ve seen unprecedented things. In fact, I’ve seen the word “unprecedented” in so many headlines, it’s starting to sound like a meaningless buzzword. But in the face of major health crises, weather events, globe-spanning social and racial justice movements, and an attack on our national legislative body, maybe it’s time to embrace the unconventional.
Whether the issue is the climate or public health or our relationship to history, we find ourselves at a crossroads. We can muster the courage to take bold action, or we can continue driving around with our heads in the clouds.
You didn’t really think this column would be about cars, did you? Guess you got “toy Yoda-ed.”