Quarantine Chronicles Day 56: When you’re out of column ideas—buy a new car!

On the 56th day, I went shopping for a new car for my wife, because Day 56 is, coincidentally, Mother’s Day.

On Mother’s Day 1988, a few months before our son was born, I snuck out and got the oak rocking chair I had bought for my wife in anticipation of her gently rocking our son to sleep in the near future. I was sneaking it up the stairs to our upper-floor duplex, proud as a pigeon, when I spotted our next-door neighbor driving up to his house with a brand new Volvo with a ribbon on top for his wife. The bastard.

So, this year I finally get to buy a new car for Mother’s Day and, it being the age of COVID and me being chained to my dining room table and computer, the best and perhaps stupidest way to buy a new car is by way of the internet and smartphone.

Test drive? Do I look like an idiot? No. I’ve never taken a test drive that resulted in me not buying the car. Waste of time.

Research? A tad. Let’s just say I didn’t over-research it. I checked out reviews in Car & Driver and somewhere else that I can’t remember, compared it to other cars in its class, plus, Jane had her heart set on a Mazda, and the CX-3 got high enough marks that that’s what I went with.

Color? I liked red, but Jane doesn’t like red, so we met in the middle with gray. Car shopping done.

But Maria, my auto buying adviser whom I was working with from the dealership, which I won’t mention by name because they wouldn’t agree to knock $3,000 off the sticker if I slobbered all over them, asked me for a barrage of documents, pretty much one at a time: pink slip for the trade-in, registration for the trade-in, photo of the odometer for the trade-in, proof of insurance, driver’s license, a rambling credit application.

It was a while before I even got to Maria, because on the dealership website, as I was perusing my options, little dialogue boxes from salespeople kept popping up wanting to chat. I asked, “What’s the interest rate for financing?” They responded, “Did you have a particular color in mind?”

“What color has the lowest interest rate? And anything but red.”

No answer. That person never returned. Another guy did, though and I told him which model I was interested in, and then he disappeared.

Finally, I just called and I got Maria.

A lot of back-and-forth, a lot of wheeling and dealing. I finally got them down to the manufacturer’s suggested list price, because I play hardball, son. And she said the manager would only give me $300 for the trade in, which was fine with me because lately the Jetta had been suffering a severe case of leprosy, shedding huge chunks of itself that I looked at and assured Jane the pieces weren’t necessary and it should drive fine without them, because, yeah, I know a little about cars.

But I wondered why I had to send in so much documentation regarding the old car, when they were just gonna compact it into one of those blocks of steel that you see on the backs of trucks on the 710 Freeway.

I can still see it out the window now, waiting for the guy from the dealership to park its shiny replacement in the driveway and then drive the Jetta off to an ending that it didn’t deserve. I always get all sentimental about my cars when they’re getting ready to be hauled off: all the trips we’ve taken, the 100,000 miles of brutal in-city driving. It was a good, dependable car until it wasn’t anymore.

Hours later: A little further palaver with the finance guy at the dealership, involving me putting $5,000 on my credit card (points! It’ll practically pay for itself!), and he told me the new car would arrive (driven by a guy with an amazing sheaf of further paperwork for me to sign), and about five hours since our quest began, our new car pulled into the driveway. Or, rather, my wife’s new car.

I hope she enjoys driving it a lot more than I enjoyed buying it. And I hope she and all the other moms out there (except for the one with the now-31-year-old broken-down Volvo, if there’s a God with a sense of humor) enjoy the rest of Mother’s Day here in the always-to-be-remembered 2020 lockdown.