the Mary saga

Monday/Tuesday, June 22/23, 2009: The Mary saga continues. If you don’t know what the Mary saga is, then you’ve never owned a Volkswagen Citi Golf before. Old-school. Mary is my red 1994 Golf, so named because her predecessor was a white Golf named Mary (also Virgin Mary) and my Bloody Mary follows in that tradition. I purchased her from Laubscher, a friend I’ve come to forgive for selling her to me, even after spending the car’s value on repairs and rebuilding the engine. (It seems over the past year some wires were crossed, the result being that water was leaking into the fuel tank, fuel into the oil, and oil straight through the car onto the ground.) Anyway, after many weeks and many rands worth of repairs, I’ve got an old Citi Golf with a patchwork (but running) engine. Yet yesterday I walked outside to find that not only would my car not start, it didn’t have anything else for me besides clicking. It clicked. That was all. After checking doubly that I wasn’t being a silly blonde and doing something obviously wrong, I came to the conclusion that whatever was causing the car to click was not of my doing. Jump starting failed, push starting worked, but there’s really only so many situations in which you can strategically plan around push starting your car every time you need to. Damn. Anyway, I called up my old friend Jesse of Stewart’s Cars (named, he says, for the famous American Jesse Owen – apparently his father was quite progressive) who invited me for tea and biscuits first thing in the morning while he sorted out my car.

When I arrived in Diep River this morning there was puzzlement written all over Jesse’s face. Now this guy has a habit of making me very nervous whenever I approach him with a problem as he has the habit of joking about serious situations to the point that I can rarely decide what’s serious and what’s farce. Well today, he poked and prodded and looked inside while I stood aside with my tea and biscuits. Suddently, a revelation – “Has anyone been poking around in here?” he asks. “No,” I respond, “not that I know of.” Suspicion is written all over his face.

“Come here,” he yells. (He always makes me look at his operations, like a surgeon determined to gross out all and sundry witnesses to his miracle work. “This here plug was undone. Now, I reckon someone has tried to disable the sparks in order to hijack your car.”*

The truth won out! Someone’s violated my poor Mary!

Luckily the problem was nothing a little super glue and duct tape wouldn’t put right, so off I sail into the sunset to face another rainy Cape Town winter day.

* Jesse doesn’t speak with a Southern accent in real life but it makes me feel more at ease to attribute one to him in writing.