I Married a Car Guy

For Car People Who Care: Rob's Datsun B-210 on our wedding day, decorated by his 11 yr. old sister. The stinker put pebbles in the hubcaps that made an insane racket whenever we slowed below 60 mph. We drove around with those rocks and noise for our whole honeymoon. Let's just say EVERYONE knew we just got married. Thanks, Sarah.  

Rob is all about cars. He’s not interested in the typical guy kinds of cars, like sports cars, fancy cars, or antique cars. He doesn't care about those cars very much. What he cares about is our cars, the ones we depend on for transportation to all the fabulous, exotic and romantic places we constantly go, like the grocery store and hardware store.

My first clue he was an unusual car guy was when he constantly rescued me and my crappy, always-breaking down car while we were dating. You want to test someone's character? Stick them in the middle of a 6-lane intersection at rush hour in over 100 degree weather in Phoenix, AZ and have the car die. Their coping skills will become quickly apparent.  More than one boy I dated failed the car test, but Rob didn’t. The second clue I had he was different, happened weeks before our wedding. He told me he bought new tires for his car.

 “They were on sale at a great price, so I snapped those baby’s up before someone else got them,” he chortled. I was confused.
“Does your car need new tires?”I asked.
“Well, not right now but it will. And when it does, we probably won’t have the money for tires. Now we don’t have to worry about it.”
Not knowing anything about tires, I shrugged and said, “Oh. Ok. Whatever you think, it is your car.”
I didn’t think about his tires again until days before our wedding, when we moved the individual boxes of our lives into the married student studio apartment on campus at the university we both attended.

As I opened boxes of Rob’s boyhood, I formed the picture of a sweet kid who liked toy match box cars, fuzzy black color-in-the-animal posters and canteens from long-abandoned Boy Scout troops. Not much of his stuff was useful for our married future, but I realized I was marrying a guy who was much more sentimental than I was. Our apartment was in an old motel the school bought and converted into housing for married but childless students. What was once the coat closet was converted into a tiny kitchen with a junior-sized stove and refrigerator.  The motel room was our bedroom, living room and study.  

When Rob triumphantly rolled in his tires, I saw we had a problem. Where were we going to put a stack of 4 car tires? Our room was barely big enough for us, a desk, a bed, and dressers. There was no room for them and besides – they were tires. Ugly, petroleum- stinky tires that turned my palms black as I tried out different corners of the room.  We finally stuck them under our full-sized bed and went off to get married. When we opened the door to our apartment  a week later, the smell of the tires was overwhelming. Oh my heavens, do tires stink! We didn’t have a fan, so I opened both windows in the apartment and propped open our front door to get fresh air moving through. All that did was dump the tire smell into the hallway, annoying every other couple who lived in the building. As we lay down to sleep that night, the gasoline/oil smell wafting from under our bed was so strong it killed any thoughts of romance. It was horrible.

What were we going to do with the tires? There were no storage lockers in the apartment building and no place to put them other than in our room. Within a couple of days of eye-watering stench, headaches and feeling overwhelmed by the chemical stink, Rob did the only thing he could. He took his proudly acquired, on sale tires and put them on the car. The perfectly good, nothing-wrong-with-them tires on the car were sold for pennies to a local tire shop. It took a couple of days, but the nasty tire smell finally left our apartment. We kept Rob’s car for two more years before selling it to another poor starving student on campus for $300. The very first thing he commented on while checking out the car was how nice the tires were.

Rob still pays attention to our cars. He obsesses about the oil levels, tire pressure and whatever else car guys care about. Just yesterday it was record-breaking cold in Iowa and he went to the gas station to put more air in the tires. There was no way in heck I would have put air in the tires in -9 degree weather, but it sure was nice knowing he would.