thoughts on a mercedez benz

the science museum

the yoga to the people class

reading about a former sergeant who is now a peace protester

the mercedes nissan difference

it has been exactly two weeks and one day since we bought a secod car. it was a very fast but unusual transaction. mailman that is my husband's friend and former classmate told us that a few blocks away lives a guy that is thinking of selling his old Mercedes Benz. Now, when we say old, old it is, but it turns out it is also collectible and ince theman is a Mercedes lover he also was taking care of it. On our first meeting he described it to me as his my baby and that it will break his heart to see it go. I suppose I felt a little bad about that, but the man also had two other cars and his wife was nagging him to sell it. He is also about 70 and from Italy, a small central town near aghhh I forgot. My husband and I joked a lot about it, picturing his Italian wife saying over and over again, ahhh just sell it, just get rid of it, we need the parking space. so we ended up really ging tfor it. this was the only car that we looked at, and we got it for 26 hunderd. a 1990 300E Mercedes benz, with a twinkle in his eye and not a little irony, my husband said, oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedez Benz.... and here it was. Black, a little square looking, bigger than I thought, heavy, with leather seats slightly worn, but very very very strong. turns out they dn't make 'em like this anymore, turns out the engine is 6 cylinder and of a better built than today's engine. turns out it cost over 100 grand back in the 90s as brand new. Turns out it only takes premium (i later learnt you can put the middle type of gas in, that is what i call it because i can't remember the real name, althouh i was just at the pump), and premium is 40 c more expensive per gallon. turns out you really have to press that gas pedal to get it going, but boy, once you do, it is flying. turns out it can get to 15 miles an hour by inertia, without any extra gas, down the hill from our house to the stop sign. So, basically, this car is not ideal for the stop and go of suburbia, it is not the best to be trailed by the new fast cars, that can quickly accelarata e in between stop signs, and then well, stop.

This car is for the a-slower-going. It puts you back in time, and I like that, it makes you breath a little easier, tune to your favorite radio and basically take it a little easier. Which I do, to the frustration of anyone who is driving behind me, but so what. I am not planning to burn gas like crazy, just cuz someone behind me is doing 40, and they should be doing that anyway.

now the highway is a totally different story. To my surprise, this car is very good on the highway, it is stable and once accelarated, it glides securely. 

Above all, having a car and a toddler and living just beyond the edges of the subway system has meant that our world has truly opened up. We were not really able to get around before. I was absolutely resisting having a second car for my so called environmental views and for the fact that traffic in NYC can be a wonderfully stubborn monster that unless studied and cajoled with skill, can bring one's nerves down very very mercilessly.

so i made it with teenie weenie babe and then was making it with a very squigly toddler without a means of transportaiton of our own until very very recently.

but now here i am, with this car, able to go many many places. and we have been, we have not stopped. it seems an age since i did not have a car you see, because now we go places every single week day, until the weekend comes, and then i rebeliouslu leave the house leaving the little one with daaddi and ride the Nissan. Whis was a funny experience tis saturday morning, i got into the Nissan and pressed the gas so hard the car basically darted like a confused arrow until i realized i have to quickly retrain my calf muscles to not do that. The Nissan now was a different creature, much faster, much more sensitive, a whole lot lighter and likened to the Mercedes it seemed like a superior but a lot more fickle gazelle, unable to understand why is someone trying to ride her as if she were a heavy-boned tiger. I must have been quite the sight.

Oh, and did I mention, thanks to being the proud owner of an old car, I now know the following things:

- lights that come on the dashboard, those are trying to tell you important things that you must pay attention to;

- a circle with an interecepted line around it means that the front break pads are worn and need to be changed;

- the engine oil must be checked more often, and there is a long think metal stick that I pull out in oder to see the level;  

- gas is expensive, there is a way to drive getting more milieage;

- a loud annoying beep comes on unless i have put on my seat belt; i dread hearing the beep;

And so it goes on.

Thanks to the freedom of owning a car, I took Ava to the NY Hall of Science yesterday. It was a meager 10 minute rider and following a brief confusion, we found free parking across from it and next to a spacious playgroun in Corona, Queens, on I believe 46th Ave and 111th st. The next few hours proceeded to be a most trying and education experience in the what seems to be new stage of toddlerhood of my little one.

She loudly and unearthingly cried upon being greeted and merely approached by my newly made mama friend. Absolutely refused to play and share with her kid and threw herself into my arms and cried even louder if such a thing is possible because I gave some magnets she had abondoned to the forementioned baby. wow. I flet as if someone had cut off my head, then levitated it to high ghigh above and giving it the opportunity to observe the scene without necessarily producing any good idea on what to do. My body meanwhile was still there, holding my screaming toddler, trying to comfort what seemed impossible to comfort.

This was very unlike Ava. So far, she has been to the MET (a much bigger, colder and more imposing museum where a toddler is hardly welcome except in very choreographed ways) at least 3 times, maybe more, she has been to many libraries, coffee shops and restaurants and has really generally been very very acceptably tolerable and even quite exemplary for a tiny human being.

but yesterday was probably what every parent dreads during a museum trip. I had to quickly act because I felt the mounting attention of parents around me and their probable suggestion, take her out. I should probably mentioned we were in the special preschool indoor sectioned off  playground, a not very big space crowded with parents and kids and science inspiring gadgets. As soon as I took her out though, she stopped crying and became a bit more friendly. SHe held onto my hand tightly and then we walked down the hallway, and into the North Wing of the museum, which is full of absolutely amazing science demonstration stations- video, devices with physical demonstrations, hand manipulation stations to teach about experiments, little booths with technology simulation. i was absolutely taken by the space and so was Ava. The tears drying on her face, my 22 month old sat with me (she pushed the sole button) through a few replays of a video on live organisms in the geysers and hot springs of the Yellowstone National Park where these same organisms who can live in environments as acidic as a car battery and hot above and beyond boiling temps fossilize the same very moments they are born. My own brain, feeling the tickle of the information, yawned lazily and said this is AWESOME. Awesome is right. This was fascinating and somehow the little onw could feel it. Now it became clear to me and it all clicked. Why keep her in a closet of loud under 3s? Look what else they got here! We proceeded to spend almost 30 solid minutes at the ocean forming demonstration stations where little pieces of dry ice moved via a tiny conveyor belt and into a pool of water where they proceeded to impressively turn into gas. This meant to explain how a long long time ago, oceans formed on our planet thanks to comets coming into our atmosphere and proceeding to melt into the depressions of the earth's relief and thus raise the water level. That is one theory at least. The glass surface of the station had tiny holes that one could blow into, therefore creating massive atmospheric movemtns akin to perhaps stormy winds. I didn't know I'd be finding myself watching comets melt, and as I watched Ava patiently watch for each comet to "drop" and then Wow with fasination, I realized that my toddler is ready for learning far beyonf the confines of the supposed toddler world full of plstic toys adn stuffed animals.