A most strange affectation came over me this week when I dropped my car off at the garage to have a new clutch put in.    My rational mind (Hmmm, is there a “rational” mind?), anyway, whatever day-to-day apparatus that is ticking inside my skull knows precisely and with certainty that an automobile is not alive, has no sentient ability, and no capacity for feeling pain or joy or boredom.  Yet, when the garage owner explained that to change the $200 clutch on my car, the mechanics would also have to drop the transmission, disconnect the 4-wheel drive and the drive shaft, leave my tires dangling unattached to the trans-axle, and remove many other little things I had idea were ever there, well suddenly I felt a pang of compassion and suffering, as if my car were about to have major surgery.  I worried that it might never be the same old reliable it had proved itself over the past 5 years.  

And so I prepared my little SUV for a trip to the hospital at the end of the week.  And just like any trip to the “other” hospital, the day before surgery, the mechanic called and explained, “Emergency we would have to delay a week.”  A new part had not arrived and why, so-to-speak, since we are already inside the abdomen removing the appendix, ignore the gall-bladder which may also need work down the road, so-to-speak.

I would no more ignore my mechanic, whom I trust, than I would my doctor, whom I also trust, so we postponed.  The troubling part was that each night I had irrational dreams about my car and all the things it had done for me over the years.  How, it had once belonged to my daughter when she got her first great job as a U.S. rep for a German company that made high tech medical equipment – particularly the machines that spin one type of material out from another.  I want to say cyclotron but I know The Great Hadron Collector is supposed to bring on the end-of-the-world so that’s not it, ah, centrifuge, that is the word.     And that car had faithfully carried her up and down the Northeast Corridor, safely gotten her from the deepest inner-city hospitals to the undisclosed, and very rural, bio-labs of Massachusetts.    And every place she visited, there waited that shiny, black car, stolid as a Palamino, pawing the ground, patiently ready to carry her onward.

The next night, it was me, and the great blizzard, cars going nowhere and I at work 25 miles away and a lonely, over-the-mountain-top road to travel to get home.  But there my car was again toasty, its four-wheel drive fully engaged as I passed tractor trailers spun out to the sides, cars spinning their wheels, and me, riding my heated version of a black musk-ox, pawing inexorably upward and forward, grunting away, “I’ll get you there.  I’ll get you there.  I’ll make this work.  I’ll get you there.”  And it did.  But still it was now 3 a.m. and I was wide awake worrying what have I done to my good and faithful companion. 

The night before the operation, was the worst.  I had called the mechanic earlier in the day asking him if he was sure this would be ok.  He said,  “Not only will the car be ok, but it will drive better than when you brought it in.”

I tried to sleep, but the dreams became disjointed, ominous.  At one point, two mechanics had removed everything inside the frame.  On the floor of the garage were seats, steering wheel, pipes, wires, gaskets, motors, hundreds of bolts and nuts.  I looked up inside the frame of the car suspended above me and there was nothing there.  It looked like a hollowed-out beetle.   

After a brief wide-awake respite to convince myself this was only a dream, back to sleep I went.  This time, the car was finished, shiny and black, and two grinning mechanics were handing me the keys and the bill.     Then I noticed on the floor a series of small unused bolts and gaskets.  “What are they?” I asked.

“No big deal,” answered one mechanic, “just a few left-overs we couldn’t find places to attach. Happens all the time.  Old cars, we make them better.  Didn’t need that old universal joint anyway.”

By morning, I wondered if I looked as haggard as I felt.

Still after two days in surgery, the mechanic drove into my driveway with my car.  It looked the same.  No wan color, no herky-jerky sputtering or odd engine sounds.  We took it for a spin.  Indeed it did feel like a youthful version of my old car.  Pep had returned, gears shifted effortlessly, and the motor  purred.  I have been driving it for two weeks and even the gas mileage is better.    So the car doctor was right.  The surgery made my car feel young again.  And if my car feels young, then I feel better.  And I haven’t had a car dream since.

Except, there was the bill neatly left in the driver’s seat.  Car doctors have to eat too, I remind myself.