Not sure if I've told you, we have a new car. It's the first new car I've owned since my second car, ever, back in 1971, which was a Ford Pinto. Don't snicker. Mine didn't blow up or break down. Mine ran forever until I sold it and moved to Germany; what happened with them after that? Not my circus, not my monkeys.
Anyway, we have a 2022 Subaru Forester (I offered the monkeys reference in the previous paragraph for my brother Kelly who has a deep and abiding unhappiness with monkeys that I'd like to think I helped start but that's a story for another time). We don't actually own the Forester, we're leasing it. I was 70 in April and in my prime, I had no mechanical so don't get me started with a state-of-the-art automobile in my advanced years. Better someone else worries about all the stuff that can go wrong especially when that someone else is not me.
I concentrate on the big picture stuff like keeping the car shiny and clean. I visit a car wash in Groton that offers those 'if it rains within' x amount of days afterward free rewash guarantees even though I will never use it (and I save all the receipts from the car wash). I'm just too embarrassed to even try to hustle someone in the business of washing cars out of a free one for something neither they nor I can control.
Instead, I collect the little tree air fresheners, in search, between you and me, of the perfect new car scent. I've never found it and I suspect it doesn't exist though I am always overwhelmed at the variety of choices confronting me when I turn and face the wall of 'free car scents,' that the wash folks have. I could probably try a different tree every week for I'm guessing close to a year and never repeat the scent.
And then very recently I had a Joyce Kilmer moment when it came to the origins of the little tree air fresheners, sort of like Saul on the road to Damascus but let's not speculate where he might have hung the little tree, shall we?
I'd like to think somewhere Alex, Geddy, and Neil are smiling (or grimacing; from this distance, among all these little trees, it's hard to tell).
-bill kenny
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