Seventy-five Cent Summer

So I have this new car now.

Okay, I've had it since February, but I couldn't bear to take pictures of my darling in awful weather. She deserves a perfect setting.

Anyway, I love my little car. I love walking home from work, turning the corner onto my street, and seeing my adorable little car smiling at me.

Hi!

When I lived in DC, a car was simply not necessary, what with the public transportation and walkable grocery stores (though I must admit - I'm playing it fast and loose when it comes to my definition of "grocery store"). Aware of this, I drove my beloved 'Scort back to Michigan in the spring of 2005, which led to the ill-fated weekend of my first niece's baby shower and six stitches in my skull.

I became accustomed to living without a car. Sometimes I wished I could just get the hell out of the city for a while, but there were always rentals.

I also got used to not having to pay for gas. Or insurance. Lord.

When I was in high school, life was easier (man, was it easier). Summers were like a completely different dimension. Kelly and I worked for a friend's aunt, the assistant manager of a Michigan title company. This particular company owned a warehouse in Milford, a good hour drive from our hometown. The Warehouse housed the old, musty, archived files, and not much else. We worked a bizarre 7 am - 3 pm schedule, which meant that we would leave for work at 6 in the morning. We were there to organize the warehouse and pull any needed files for Dick, a sweet, mustachioed, cigarette-auraed man, to come collect. If he arrived early, we would leave early.

It was lovely.

It was lovely and cushy, and we were lucky. For two soon-to-be high school seniors in the summer of 1997, making ten dollars an hour was a pretty good deal. Especially when you consider how much work we actually did.

Or, didn't do, rather.

We would arrive at the warehouse, a nondescript building in the middle of a rather random lumber yard, around 7 a.m. We'd stop at Speedway or McDonald's for breakfast and we'd listen to Detroit's Drew & Mike morning radio show (now "Mike in the Morning" without a retired Drew).

After a while, we had a pretty set routine:

7 ~ Arrive at warehouse
7-10:30 ~ Listen to Drew & Mike until they went off the air
10:30-12 ~ Play "dots," write retarded stories, nap
12-1 ~ Lunch, usually at Subway, with which we were obsessed for years
1-1:45 ~ Arrive at satellite title company to receive fax of files to be pulled
1:45-2 ~ Go to Kroger for pop
2-3 ~ Wait for Dick to arrive to collect files
3 ~ Leave for home

It all went downhill the day we brought in sleeping bags and pillows and slept on the shelves.

Really, we did.

And we got paid for this.

We would take turns driving - even at seventy-five cents a gallon, we were still just high school students. Me in my 1996 Escort, her in her 1985 almost-good-as-new Topaz (affectionately named "Klancy"). The days she drove were usually more entertaining. Merging onto I-75 was usually a brush with death because there was almost always a massive semi barreling up behind us in the right lane, laying on the horn, unable to switch lanes. Y'all, Klancy couldn't outrun a big rig, even when driving through Detroit, where the speed limit would inconceivably drop to 55 miles per hour. So, every other day we'd fire up Klancy and find ourselves in the middle of a situation comedy - turning around slowly, spying the semi, and screaming in unison.

That summer was a blast. I was home from work by 4 p.m. and then I'd head to the pool or the park or anywhere else. I'll never forget the day that gas dropped to $.75 per gallon. Seventy-five CENTS. We cruised the main roads, as everyone did, though the 'Scort and Klancy weren't all that awe-inducing. But we didn't care. It was summer, we were seniors, and we owned the world.

As far as I remember, the price per gallon hovered around one dollar for the entire summer.

Now? I still walk everywhere I can, and as much as possible. I suppose that I could drive the two miles to work, but I refuse to pay $1.10 an hour to park. I'll walk it. The gas prices aren't affecting me that much, and I'm lucky to get good gas mileage. But I still have to pay!

It's summer again, and it's been over ten years since that glorious high school summer. My life might not be as carefree as it once was, but I suppose that's part of growing up. Living in DC changed me, though. I don't think that walking to work would have been conceivable to me in 1997. I would have thought that it was too far, too hot, too time-consuming... Now I feel guilty for driving, for wasting gas and for blowing money on parking.

I mean, there's always the bus.