There are six buttons on the dashboard of my vehicle, each corresponding with a different radio station. When I’m driving, I can skim through the radio stations until I find something that I don’t mind listening to. This is likely going to be either the trashiest top 40 pop song that happens to be playing, or an old familiar rock song that everyone half-knows.
While I drive, I adjust music without really knowing I’m doing it. Navigating away from commercial breaks, listening to snatches of different songs and deciding which one I’d like to hear through to the end. This is how I listen to music, mostly. I’m pretty sure other people do this diffetently, anymore, but it still works.
Sometimes I’ll croak out some of the lyrics, or try to harmonize. I am glad that nobody is listening. It’s a nice distraction from the knowledge that I’m hurtling through time and space inside of an ancient rustbucket that still just happens to miraculously work, when I ask nicely.
The rustbucket’s name is Helen. She’s a kelly-green Jeep from the mid 00’s. She is covered in peeling and faded bumper stickers. She burns oil and the tread on one of the tires wears thin faster than the rest of them. She doesn’t like accelerating up any of the hills. Her best feature is her radio. And she plays CD’s.
I have lots of memories from before the pandemic – before Europe, even – of having to stop and refill the tank about once a week. In the winter, the metal pump handle would be so cold that my fingers would go numb. I’d stand there and watch the digital numbers on the screen tick at regular internals… dollars as a function of gallons. It’s a linear function, but the slope keeps changing in response to changing variables that seem very far away.
Now that I’m not driving every day, the intervals between refills are longer. This is nice, because I’m saving a little money. But also the less time I spend driving the more frightened I am, every time I get behind the wheel. Out of practice.
I’ve come up with an ingenious way to avoid the company of other humans.
Right now, masks are required in all of the public buildings around campus. As they should be. Still, I don’t love the feeling of something covering my mouth and nose and I’m still trying to stay away from other humans if I can help it. But there are these long stretches of time between my weekly mandatory COVID test and classes, and home is too far away to justify not just waiting it out.
Recently, I’ve been finding a place to park my car near the college. I fold the seats down in the back and set up camp behind the passenger’s seat. I balance a computer on my lap, books and papers spread out on the floor around me. If I crack the windows, it isn’t stifling. It’s not exactly cozy but it works. And it suits me.
There are vast halls and little nooks and niches, all over campus, all of them meant for students to gather and work. These are mostly closed down, right now. I wish I was spending time in these places, getting to know this college, maybe finding things to like.
But for the moment, I’m just camping out in the back of my car, working. I got into the habit of buying sandwiches from the gas station on the corner. Sometimes I sip orange juice or coffee. I have almost decided on a parking spot, actually. There’s a public lot behind a dentist’s office, an office building, and a restaurant & bar. The parking lot has two hour parking until 4PM, and I don’t even get there until 2. It works for me, for the moment.
This is just one way my life is weird and different because of the pandemic. But I don’t mind this. It’s peaceful and kind of nice. I’ll take it.
When it’s time to go home, now that the weather is nice, I roll down the windows and turn up the music. I take an unnecessarily indirect route home so as to avoid every single one of the scary intersections. I drive by the end of one of the smallest finger lakes, through the town where my older sister spent half of her childhood time.
So – yeah. I am practically living out of my car, except when I’m not. Except when I’m at home.
Life settles into a rhythm, doesn’t it
Even when everything is strange.
I hope it’s an excellent Tuesday.