The Resurrection Volvo

The Resurrection Volvo October 31, 2016

ljubljana_car_crash_2013Just about nine months ago—the Tuesday after Valentine’s Day, to be exact—I hit a carload of nuns.

It’s not like I was trying to or anything, though: It was the middle of the morning, a misty winter day. I was driving on a quiet street in the part of Washington, D.C. that’s sometimes called “Little Rome,” owing to the number of monastic institutions surrounding the Catholic University of America. From the right lane, the carload of nuns made an unexpected wide left-hand turn passing in front of me, and my Honda ran right into their left-side passenger door.

With a pop and the faint burning smell of sulphur, the airbag exploded into my face, like a kind of giant, surreal mushroom.  I put the stick shift in park and—amazingly collected—turned the radio and then the car off, and got out calmly.

These were young nuns, twenty-something, in long habits—one of whom came running over with: “Oh my gosh, that’s not cool.”

I greeted the nuns with social grace (funny how the force of habit takes over at a time like this), walked with them to their convent, and received a few cups of tea from their hands while waiting for the tow truck and my husband to show up. We talked about the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd as a method for teaching young children, and expressed enthusiasm for each other’s insights.

My husband came. The car got towed away. I went home and then went nuts, shaken from trauma, my limbs spiked with adrenaline. I was not dead!

Also, I had no car.

Now the good thing about it is that I live in a functioning community, where neighbors really can rely on one another. My dear friend Lisa (hey Lisa!) uncomplainingly began picking my children up every morning and taking them to school. We live close enough to the Metro that I could just walk the mile (uphill!) to the station to get to work, with a workout built in.

Even so, just about every morning, I’d have a neighbor done with her or his own carpool sidle their car over by the sidewalk and offer to drive me over to the station. (Cindy! Marisa! Kevin!)

But that was only a short-term solution. And thus we were forced to face, rather quickly, one of the great unresolved issues of our marriage, my husband’s car: The 1999 Emerald Green Volvo V-60.

The Volvo had been the touchstone of good times—a couple of drives to Martha’s Vineyard, nights driving through downtown DC blasting ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” the reliable smell of cracked and aged leather that could, in itself, smell like security.

But there was also the bane of Volvo owners: the insanely expensive and boutique-y repairs.  This car had thus been paid off twice over, and after being quoted a more-money-than-we-had-at-the-moment repair (or so we thought), we had left it in the parking lot of the Hyattsville, Maryland, repair shop.

And we had not gone back to get it. And now it was eighteen months later.

I can say a lot of things about my husband and me at the moment: our lack of advance planning, our weird and inconsistent forms of frugality. (I grew up with that, as you know—the appliances that will work just fine if you only hit them in the right way, and other OCD-type compulsions that my rich yuppie siblings have all seemed to exorcise, while I am still standing with duct tape and Gorilla Glue in hand.)

But the real hero of this story is Michael X, the owner of the auto repair shop, who had not said a word or even made a call to us during the entire year and a half that the emerald green Volvo wagon sat there in his parking lot.

We would wave at it sometimes when we drove by, on our way out to a restaurant to dinner.

All of a sudden, poor Michael X was faced with the vision of a supplicating family of four, descending upon his repair shop: The slightly bohemian, ragged father, and mother in the long baal t’shuvah skirt, and the children with their hoodies.

And as though we were Abraham, in stereo, we said: “Here we are!”

Back from the dead. Back from distraction. Michael X, saint that he is, to be honored someday in icons depicting scenes of auto repair, charged us nothing for holding on the car for eighteen months, got the thing in order, and helped us update the registration.

It was exactly halfway between my Catholic husband’s and my Orthodox Easter—in a year when the feasts are farther apart than ever.

I’ll never forget settling myself behind the wheel of our repaired Volvo, my first automatic after decades driving only manual transmissions, and gunning the motor as I gained on the hill while driving home.

I listened to the sound of the powerful motor, yielding under my foot’s vaguest pressure on the accelerator, throttling forward—not unlike my mother’s own Ford LTD, that unmistakeable force from my childhood. Now this was a car that would not crumple upon impact, driving ten miles per hour.

I am driving it still.

And I am thinking: All is Grace, all is Grace, all is Grace.

Selah.

GL banner

A native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Caroline Langston is a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She is a widely published writer and essayist, a winner of the Pushcart Prize, and a commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered.

Image above by Dino Kužnik from Ljubljana, Slovenia (Flickr Uploaded by Sporti), cropped. [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.


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