The Curse of St. Christopher

When I acquired my first car, the lady from whom my parents purchased it on my behalf gifted me with a pendant bearing the image of St. Christopher. She told me that, although she herself was not Catholic, she had been given the pendant when she got her first car and had kept it hanging from the rear-view mirror of each car she had owned, and that it felt right to her to pass it on to me, with what would be my first car. While I thought that a more useful gift would have been to remove all traces of the horrid vanilla air freshener that had been clipped to the glove box, I appreciated the sentiment and thanked her warmly, and St. Christopher stayed in his place of honor, dangling just behind the windshield. I felt, as I rocketed through the Ohio countryside in this vehicle of which I was still getting the feel but with which I had already fallen in love, somehow safer, as if this pendant, given with such honest intentions, would actually protect me from harm.

The trouble started about a month later, after I'd settled into the car, which I'd christened Akio (after Akio Ohtsuka, the voice of Batou in the various animated incarnations of Ghost in the Shell.) It was a windy day, over which hung a mass of roiling gray thunderheads, coyly waiting for just the right moment to let loose and start raining in earnest. I was on my way home after a trip to the nearest Pat Catan's for art supplies, and as I was nervous about taking the highway with the threat of heavy rain looming, I had decided to take the long way back into town. Unfortunately I'd forgotten what those heathens in Indian-name-nobody-can-spell-unless-they-live-here Falls called the state route I needed to get onto, and as the intersection was not marked with any sort of number-bearing sign, I'd ended up driving quite a ways out of the way looking for it. I was at an intersection, preparing to turn right into a parking lot where I could check my map, or at least turn around and find an alternate route through the streets I recognized from my commute to work, when it happened.

WHAM.

The first thing I registered was that the open bottle of Coke in my cupholder had exploded onto my seat, the shifter, and my pants; the realization that someone had just rear-ended me came a few seconds later. The car seemed okay - it was rumbling away as usual, and Megumi Hayashibara was still belting out Omokage through the stereo. I checked my mirror; the driver of the car behind me was signaling that he'd turn into the nearby parking lot as well, and as soon as the light changed, I, still shaking madly, trundled cautiously around the corner and pulled into the nearest empty space I could find, terrified that the back end of the car was going to fall off.

 As it turned out, Akio was fine. There was barely even a scratch, and my novelty bumper stickers survived unscathed. The man who ran into me was very nice about the whole thing, and he seemed relieved that I wasn't going to call the police or anything (I didn't see the use, as there was no damage to either myself or the vehicle, and I was positive they had better things to do than come look at a little nick in my car. After he'd make sure I was all right, he left, and I turned around and went home by the first street I recognized. By the time I got home, the incident had changed from terrifying to interestingly funny in my mind, and when I told my parents the story, I think I even joked about how St. Christopher should have been protecting me from something like that. He can't be everywhere at once, said my mom, and we went on with our lives.

A few weeks later, I was stopped at a red light on my way to school when the motorist behind me tapped on my window and informed me that I had a flat tire. I hadn't noticed any of the tires being low when I'd gotten into the car, so I assumed it had been punctured by something and pulled into the parking lot of a nearby community center. I called my parents to let them know what had happened, and my dad came out to help me change the tire. Neither of us could see any sign of puncture in the flat tire, and he suggested that I try just filling it up with air, putting it back on the car, and then keeping an eye on it. The next morning, I braved a chilly rain to do just that, and the tire behaved perfectly from that point on. How odd.

Finally, things got serious. It was November 2nd, and I was having a wonderful day. I'd gotten up early to go help vote in a more conservative congress, had just participated in an extremely enjoyable art class, and was on my way home to change clothes before heading out to the job that I didn't exactly enjoy, but which I liked well enough for the awesome people I did it with. I was about a block away from my house, crawling through the midafternoon traffic jam, one hand tapping the steering wheel in time to Bad Apple!!, wondering if I could make it to work on the same playlist I'd been going through since I'd left the house that morning.

WHAM.

It was a more intense WHAM than the first time, and shortly after it came a second WHAM. Envisioning a pileup, I decided to curl up in a ball and wait for everything to stop, wishing that someone would turn that bloody music down (in my panic I'd forgotten how to work the stereo.) I raised my head from the fetal position when I heard the driver of the car behind me tapping on my window to see if I was all right. I nodded, and shakily piloted my car around a corner onto a nearby side street. I remembered that, although my first collision had felt terrifying as well, there hadn't been any damage to the car whatsoever, and I expected to see maybe a scratch or a dent, something more along the lines of a battle scar that could become an interesting story once everything stopped being so scary. However, as I got out of the car and looked toward the rear end, a sick feeling began churning deep down inside my stomach as I noticed the driver's side taillight hanging very visibly out of its socket.

Basically, Akio's back end was a complete mess. Half of the bumper was in shards, and a large chunk of it had actually fallen off. The lid of the trunk was crumpled upward, to the point that I had to force it open and was unable to get it to close again. My stickers were ruined: "What Would Gordon Freeman Do?" was in admittedly still readable ribbons; "Kayabuki - Aramaki 2012" was fragmented beyond legibility, and all that remained of "D0G is my copilot" was a tiny shred of a corner. Wanting very much for someone to hug me, I called my mom, and she walked over almost at once. After taking some pictures of the damage, collecting the necessary insurance information, and filling out the police paperwork, Akio and I limped sadly home. I wondered aloud why St. Christopher had allowed this to happen, and my mom reminded me that his area of expertise was travelers, not vehicles.

Incidentally, I had to call off of work for an entire week due to an injury I sustained to my shoulder during the crash.

To make matters worse, the repair estimate for the car --my first car, my Akio-kun, the one I was supposed to drive into the ground and have all sorts of awesome stories about-- came back as 'chuck it and get a new one'. I was understandably heartbroken; I'd had the thing for all of three months, and everything about it, from the look to the space to the way it handled, fit me like a well-sized glove. However, insurance companies don't factor sentimental value into settlements, although ironically I ended up receiving an amount very near what it would have cost to fix the old car with which to pay for a new one. The last time I saw Akio was when I went to pick up the plates and leave my keys with the shop that would be handling the salvage. I took a piece of the bumper to remember him by, and I still have the personalized charm I made for him hanging in front of one of the windows in my room.

The proceeds from the settlement went entirely toward my new car, another 2002 ZX2, which I named Atsuko, after Atsuko Tanaka, the Japanese voice of Major Motoko Kusanagi. My reasons for doing this were many; first of all, I name all of my name-worthy possessions after voice actresses or singers; second, we have something of a Ghost in the Shell theme going with car names in my family (my mother's Prius is actually named Motoko because it's more computer than car, and I jokingly refer to my dad's Subaru Forester as Ishikawa because it's old and ugly and smells like cigarettes); third, it sounded reasonably similar to 'Akio', which seemed appropriate as it was the same car only in a different color (dark blue as opposed to red); and fourth, because I am not at all a fan of Ms. Tanaka's portrayal of the aforementioned Major Kusanagi, and I was determined not to love this car in the same way I'd loved the other. Also, one of my computers was already named 'Mary Elizabeth', and this car was undeniably female and didn't feel much like a Barbara or Yoshiko, so my options were limited. Still, in an attempt to make the best of things, I made a new charm for Atsuko, fitted her out with the rest of my car bling, including St. Christopher, and tried to move on. I still hadn't made the connection.

Atsuko had brake problems starting about half an hour off the lot, but about $600 at the repair shop cleared that up, and we settled into a grudging respect for each other. Then winter came, and with it, my first experience driving in snow. Not just any snow, mind you, but the snow that's been barreling across the Midwest, that caved in that one footballing arena, and that's left streets everywhere barren, inhospitable icy messes. I did all right on the drive down to school; I got into the flow of steering into the skids, and I was practically crawling anyway. On the way home, however, the roads were much clearer, and as I felt that the car was gripping better than it had on the trip there, I decided to speed up a little (though still not to the extent I would have had there been no snow at all.) Everything felt fine. The car started to skid slightly to the left, and I corrected it. Then, suddenly, the car spun in the opposite direction, and the next thing I remember is finding myself stuck in a snowbank. I'd also destroyed someone's mailbox. Oops.

After returning home, deeply ashamed of my mishap, I marched straight out to the car and removed the St. Christopher pendant from the rear-view mirror. Enough was enough - he was obviously happy where he was and hadn't taken to me at all. Although I hadn't come to any serious, lasting harm through my various vehicular misadventures, my cars, through what I can only assume is some sort of loophole in the Saint Code, hadn't been so lucky. Akio was sitting in a scrapyard being slowly picked apart, and now here was Atsuko with an enormous dent in her driver's side rear quarter panel, a dent that I interpreted as a warning shot. I'd have to be an idiot not to get the message at this point; I've been a licensed driver for all of five months, and I have owned multiple vehicles. That isn't right.

So we'll see how things go from here. Either it was the curse of St. Christopher all along, or I just have really bad luck when it comes to cars; if I get in another accident, I'll know. I'm happy to report, though, that on Monday I drove in weather just as bad, if not worse, than that of the previous Monday, when the mailbox incident occurred, and although at one point my car skidded so badly that I was perpendicular to the road, with oncoming traffic in both directions, Atsuko and I both made it home safe and sound.