Published: July 18, 2008 12:32 pm         

She’s psychoanalyzing her car

I have a 2007 Chevy Cobalt. It’s a nice little car. It’s easy on gas which is pretty important, with the price of fuel as high as it is and as much as I drive.

Some people impute human emotions to animals, which is called anthropomorphism, something that is mocked as overly sentimental by reality-based scientists. I’m guilty of anthropomorphism. It is easy for me to think of dogs or cats or camels, for that matter, as feeling love or hate or sadness. But I’m worse than an anthropomorphist. I even endow inanimate objects with human feelings. As far as I know, this is so far beyond the pale, there isn’t even a label for it.

I don’t carry it to extremes. I mean, I don’t adore my toaster or my even my washer (although I do feel a certain amount of fondness for the coffee pot), but cars and computers are different. I spend more time with either of them than I do my best friends. And I depend on them more, too. If I didn’t have either one, my income would cease.

To me, cars have distinctly different personalities. My favorite car of all time was a Camaro named Grey. Grey and I were kindred spirits. He brought me through first a blinding downpour crossing Washington, D.C., then an ice storm in Maryland, then a blizzard in the Pennsylvania mountains. The next day when I talked to a semi driver in the rest area on the interstate, he couldn’t believe he made it only eight miles farther than I did before we were both forced off the highway. I wasn’t surprised because I knew the kind of faithful companion Grey was.

When Grey reached the end of the road, I bought a new Ford Taurus named Regina. Regina never liked me. I could practically see her holding her nose in distaste when I smoked. She thought she was too good for me is what it was. She deserved a classier owner.

Regina was followed by a white Buick LeSabre, a truly great car. I drove Chief for years until he died of old age and ended up in the junkyard/mortuary to be compressed (which is, I guess, the vehicular version of cremation).

Then I took over the payments on my son’s black Chevy S10, special edition, expensive edition, pickup. It was one of those trucks whose bottom practically touched the pavement. My son had gotten married. His wife had a new car. They didn’t want to make payments on two expensive vehicles. I needed a new car; he wanted to get out from under one. It seemed like a deal that was in our mutual benefit at the time. So I ended up with a sporty little pickup.

But I always felt like an idiot driving it. It had a state-of-the-art sound system and darkly tinted windows. I thought that when people saw it, they watched for the driver to emerge, expecting to see long tan legs and long blonde hair. Instead, they got a pudgy senior citizen who was obviously trying to recapture her lost youth. I had the urge to assure total strangers, “It’s not really mine; I borrowed it from my son.”

I traded the truck for the Cobalt, and by and large, I’ve been satisfied with almost everything about it. Almost. Except for one extremely frustrating problem. I can’t parallel park the darned thing.

Parallel parking has always been one of my areas of expertise. When you have as few areas of expertise as I have, every one of them is important. So I was proud that when the deputies were standing outside the sheriff’s department, they would watch me with admiration as I parked the Buick in a space not much more than a couple inches longer than the car itself. And I didn’t have to maneuver back and forth either. Just line up, turn in, straighten out and I was parked perfectly.

I even got the hang of parking the truck pretty quickly but now I have this little baby car and sometimes it takes me three or four tries and I’m still two feet from the curb and sometimes, I just give up and go find a spot I can drive into head-first.

I just don’t understand why I can’t get the logistics of parking the Cobalt through my head. So here’s the thing. Is the car doing it on purpose? I thought we had a pretty good relationship going. It’s certainly dependable. I can’t fault it for that. But why is it so uncooperative about parking? Does it simply have a rebellious streak that causes it to refuse to submit completely to my authority or maybe just a bit of a mischievous sense of humor? Is it laughing at me behind my back?

Maybe I shouldn’t have called it Billy the Kid.

Vicki Williams is a columnist for the Pharos-Tribune. She can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com