There Was a Brief Pause in Transmission

The weirdest "my car was totaled" story you will ever hear

Hello beloved readers, subscribers and followers! Welcome to the first September post of Crone Life, my substack newsletter about living with the consequences of aging.

I had intended to start writing and posting again last weekend but this happened

Caused by this

My car (the green one) was parked next to a pickup truck that caught on fire. The front driver’s-side quarter, including the tire, melted. The windows shattered from the heat. It’s been declared a total loss. I did not take this well. I basically went out of my mind and asked everyone I knew if I could sue the truck owner (the fire was caused by him spraying ether onto the carburetor when the track wouldn’t start, and then restarting it.) He is a chemistry professor with a PhD from Yale and I suspect he had tried the ether trick before.

I was very worried that I was underwater on my car loan, but it turned out I had a little bit of equity so I had a tiny bit of cash. Also a bank agreed to lend me money at a fairly reasonable rate. Now I just needed to find a car, which proved harder than anticipated. I drove 45 minutes to a nearby city a few days ago (after work!) to check out a used Forester that seemed perfect, only to be told it had been sold an hour before I got there and they didn’t have anything comparable. I maintained my classy cool, said “I see there’s no reason for me to stay here” and stalked out, only to realize when I got back to the rental car that I really needed to pee. Fortunately there was a Whole Foods down the street, so I avoided having to crouch behind a bush and compromise my dignity. For once I regretted not being a guy so I could have pissed on one of their cars.

I was briefly the queen of my workplace gossip network, spreading my anger about the professor’s carelessness far and wide in hopes it would get back to him in exaggerated form and make him feel bad. Though I did speak to him in the parking lot and he expressed how sorry he was several times. So did his wife. I told them I was very upset but I expected they already felt terrible and I wasn’t going to try to make them feel worse. Am I not a class act?

I read in the Times that used cars with low prices and low mileage are at a premium. I had a Mazda CX-5 rental and I didn’t like it at first. But after I drove to the loser dealership and back again, a journey I’ve made many times because it’s most of the way to my mother’s house, I realized the Mazda is really easy to drive and maybe that’s a big point in its favor.

I searched out a 2020 model at a local dealership and they were very nice and got me a good rate on the financing. It is financed up the wazoo, but what can you do? I had concerns about buying a Kia, I had a Hyundai before and didn't like it enough to replicate the experience, and everything else available seemed to be a Jeep and I have test driven those and not liked them at all (granted, it was a while ago but I could only afford an old one anyway).

So that's done and sitting in my garage. Presumably I will be paying for it for the next 5 years. A co-worker has a 10 year old one and loves it, so there is hope. I have gap insurance and a 3 year warranty, i's dotted, t's crossed.

Next: I’ve been overwhelmed at work. There used to be four people in my department. Two retired and one is on maternity leave, leaving me, wag. I met with my boss and said it was all too much and I couldn't be in 4 places at once and I needed help and he told me I could just close the office if I didn't have a sub and needed to be elsewhere. I spoke with the union president and she told me to stop trying to make things go smoothly. So now the department faculty is very pissed off and I've just been telling them to email the Head of the Libraries to complain. I also told them (my supervisors at the main library) that I was taking my birthday off as is my god-given right and they meekly accepted (it's in the union contract, not like they could really say No).

I have hired and trained and scheduled a bunch of student assistants and they are all quite lovely, but I have to talk for an hour at a time for each training session and inevitably I start coughing and losing my voice about 30-40 minutes in, sometimes sooner. I was not born to lecture. Maybe I need to visit an ENT.

Soon things will calm down, maybe. A temp will start on Monday, replacing my non-retired colleague who is on maternity leave and will return in February 2026, I hope, because I love working with her.

My lower back has given out (stress) and I am sitting here with a heating pad seriously contemplating chopping a leftover oxy into small bits so I can get some pain relief, as icing, stretching, and ibuprofen have so far not made a dent and I am walking bent over like a shuffling zombie.

Content Consumption

I read 12 books in August, a month that seems like a year ago.

1. The Raven Scholar, Antonia Hodgson. Kind of scholomance-ish, first of a series. I enjoyed this but the main character suffers reversals which are hard to keep track of and the basis of the society (something to do with animal clans?) isn’t well-explained. Would read the next, though.

2. The Flood Circle, Harry Connolly. Twenty Palaces is almost at an end! I love Connolly’s writing and I wish he was more popular, he deserves it.

3. The Friday Afternoon Club, Griffin Dunne. He has certainly led an interesting life, but not a lot of introspection here.

4. Gwyneth, Amy Odell. Amy is such a good journalist. I only read this because she wrote it. Lots of good cultutral insights, even if you think Goop is silly.

5. Sleep, Honor Jones. This was better than the other novel about childhood sexual abuse I read. Felt authentic, but not in a gross way. Should read something else by her.

6. Endling ( first half), Maria Reva. I ran out of time reading this because it was a 14-day loan. It has a conventional first half and then, apparently, a wildly different second half, but I’ll never know.

7. Swordheart, T. Kingfisher. Seems like the prototype for the Paladin novels, but could be the other way around. Of course, I enjoyed it very much.

8. Empire of the Elite, Michael Grynbaum. Dropped it when I realized I already know too much about Anna Wintour and don’t really care about Tina Brown.

9. A Brightness Long Ago, Guy Gavriel Kay. This and the next one are the 2nd and 3rd installments of a loose trilogy of historical fantasy, very soothing in their way. I need to sprinkle in more of these.

10. Written on the Dark, Guy Gavriel Kay. See above.

11. The Society of Unknowable Things, Gareth Brown. This starts out kind of stupid but ends up being terrifying. I tried to read his first fantasy novel, The Book of Doors, which has what seems like an excellent premise but starts so slowly (and with such annoyingly naive characters) that I couldn’t persist. Maybe I’ll try again? I could skip a few chapters or start in the middle.

12. The Dream Hotel, Laila Lalami. I liked this and its subtle message that being a “good girl” doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere, but in the end it’s more of an idea than an actual story. There is a subplot that seems like it might be important but goes nowhere.

We got tired of Family Movie Night because we can’t agree and are exploring alternatives.

News From Veronica

She is very, very cute. Some examples: for some reason I was home on a weekday and woke up just as my husband left for his run. An hour later I heard a crescendo of frenzied squeaking and Veronica rushed up the back steps and into the house, still squeaking madly. My husband came in from the front and said he’d seen a cat who looked just like her in the driveway. We put two and two together after that. They seemed equally shocked at having encountered each other. We didn’t even know she knew the house has a front.

She is very play-motivated and will chase or jump on almost anything. I entertain her every day with the battered string toy we got her last year when she was a kitten. Occasionally she finds a bug to chase and she is blissfully happy.

Veronica pouncing on a piece of string she found somewhere. I added the b&w filter because I thought it made the details easier to see.

What does this have to do with aging? Well, for one thing, I thought senior life would be more serene and not involve exploding pickup trucks. I also did not realize that cars would need constant replacing. I’m sad because I think this Mazda might be my last car ever, assuming they don’t pull my license for erratic driving or something. If it’s the end, I would like it to feel more deliberate.

I’ll be 65 on my birthday and I thought things would be more settled by now, so to speak, but everything still feels wobbly.

Thanks for reading! If you have any disbelief-inducing car-loss stories, feel free to put them in the contents. Click the heart if you enjoyed reading this. Or if you like Veronica. Or both!