After Petaluma and the weekend it was back to Vallejo of a cloudy Monday to have some blood

sucked out and then nice cool sunny April days until we went high

into the hills of Berkeley for a long delayed visit/lavish dinner with Michael Katz, longtime

friend and sometime Medical Professional.  Another couple of those days followed,

until we decided, perhaps ill-advisably, on takeout from Gaby’s just as, unexpectedly and

unbelievably, the Impossible Tundra I’d been watching for for going on three years turned up on the internet.  After a mostly sleepless night I was thus atypically and precipitously off to the

Roseville Auto Mall for an appointment with Anisha, unexpectably Nepali, to look at a truck

so new to the lot it hadn’t been properly prepped yet.  It looked good on the outside and under the hood but interiorwise it looked like pigs had been partying and smoking copiously…

Nonetheless, way closer than anything I’d seen in all those years lurking online and with a promising Carfax history* and zero rust so what if it smelled a little weird…

Four hours later thanks to Sullivan’s overly exuberant detailing crew** it smelled even weirder

but I was driving it home, buzzed on my own day-old caffé freddo, nostalgic for but not really missing that cracked-by-buzzards right hand mirror although giving up those new Yokohamas

had been rather painful.  Probably the last earthly vehicle I’ll buy in this lifetime and the one

before it, well, after more than eighteen years and 210,000 miles of some pretty extreme shit

it never left me stranded.  If it hadn’t been rusting out around the windshield I’d be driving and repairing it still.  So, into the unknown…

 

*I was particularly impressed with the service history, but time will tell.

** There wasn’t so much pressure to buy as the assumption that having shown up that was my intention, true, and although it’d been almost a quarter century since I’d bought a “used car” there it was.

 

Time will tell…