Adventures at the car wash

                                             By Dave Hamby

              People who know me and know what kind of car nut I am are amazed at how dirty my wife’s car can get.   My car stays clean pretty much all of the time, as does our motor home, the Suzuki we tow behind it, and even our old Oliver tractor that we use to cut the grass on the five plus acres of land we live on.   The fact is, her car is her car and I’ve learned to respect how she chooses to care for it.   That, and the fact that she sometimes yells at me for messing with her ride.  

              It wasn’t always like this.  Used to be she would go through one of those free car washes every time she gassed up.   Then one day I foolishly pointed out to her that those free car washes were bad for the paint on her car.   The same little blue bristles that were always getting stuck in the edges of her trim were what was creating all of those little scratches and it was those scratches that were dulling her paint. (This was on her last car)   She hasn’t driven through one of those car washes since.

              I do clean her car for her every once in a while, that being every time she’s out of town on business.   I’ve done this ever since her car once got so dirty once it blended in with our driveway and we had to rent a metal detector to find it.   I carefully take her stuff out from the interior and either put it in the trunk, (she has a Chrysler Concorde and it has a big trunk) or set the stuff on our dinning room table so she can put it back in her car when she gets back in town.   Then I drive it to the Spiffy Shine car wash and order the Super Spiff Special, have the oil changed, check the tire pressures and gas it up.

              Whenever I order the Super Spiff  Special, the attendant asks me what kind of fragrance I’d like.   Being as how my wife has the LXI trim package, (as a result of this several cows had to give up the skin off of their posterior in order for Chrysler to have the proper covering for the interior,)  I always say “Leather please.”   This means I sometimes get jasmine, sometimes cherry, other times I get vanilla.   The only time I actually got leather was when I was visiting my daughter in Mesquite.   I had the car cleaned at the Spiffy Shine there and they were real busy.   I’m guessing they had run out of all of the other fragrances.

              Once I stupidly complained to the car wash manager that they used the wrong fragrance.  What a big mistake.  He had the master spray bottle technician spray enough leather fragrance in the interior of my wife’s car so that I could no longer smell the ample amounts of cherry fragrance he had just sprayed a few minutes earlier.   Problem was, after all that spraying there wasn’t any room left in the interior for oxygen.   My wife drove my Z28 that next week while her car sat in our garage airing out with the windows down. I got to drive the Suzuki.   The garage smelled so bad the dogs wouldn’t even go in there.  On the bright side, I didn’t see any bugs around the house so I canceled our monthly visit by the exterminator.

                I tried outsmarting the attendant and the fragrance technician.   The visit before last I asked that they not spray any fragrance at all.  “You sure,” asked the attendant.   “It comes free with the Special.”   I told him I was certain.  He looked at me like I was some kind of nut, passing up free fragrance.  He wrote down “No fragrance” on the order form.  I got mint.  

                Just yesterday when I went to the car wash and the attendant asked me what fragrance I wanted, I said, “Vanilla.”   I got jasmine.   I like jasmine a lot more than cherry, so next time I’ll ask for cherry.   Maybe I’ll get leather, maybe I’ll get something else.   Sooner or later I’m bound to figure out the code word for leather.   After all, they only have fifteen fragrances.

              Still, my wife thanks me most of the time for cleaning her car. She does that because she’s nice.   I see her wrinkle her nose when she gets in it.   I suspect she drives to work with her windows down.   It’s a great sacrifice for her, but I make her go through it so I’ll be certain she can see through her windows.   I get nervous riding around in a car that’s so dirty you can’t see what’s going on outside.

This article originally appeared in the Round Rock Leader.   It has since been modified and is available for your publication