In which the Meridian reports that his car unnerves him

There are times when my car unnerves me.

It's a 1993 Toyota Corolla, bought new in 1994 and which looks just like the one you see here (though mine has hail dings on the hood and a cracked windshield--but is missing only one of its wheelcovers, so there). It's about as unassuming a car as one can imagine, and let's just say that over the intervening 13 years it has become more and more unassuming. On this week's Thursday trip up to Topeka, it just turned 265,000 miles. It's had a couple of alternators; it had to have the AC compressor replaced due to the fact that your correspondent, back in his Mobile days, damaged it by driving over a stump that he (incorrectly, as it resulted) thought even his ground clearance-challenged car could clear--this in the middle of summer, mind; it's had its CV half-shaft replaced; and, thanks to my father-in-law, it's just had its second brake job.

All that is pretty ordinary. It's the not-so-ordinary stuff that is unnerving.

It's never had a tune-up, yet on good days it can still get 40 miles/gallon on the highway. About two years ago, a mechanic told me that the battery tested "weak" and that, since winter was coming on, I should get it replaced. Okay, I said, and then promptly forgot all about it (funny how not having the extra $40 or so creates a selective amnesia). It has never failed to crank in all that time since with that same "weak" battery, including one morning a couple of months ago when your correspondent came out and saw that the car's dome light was still on from the previous night when he had turned it on to look for something in the car and then had forgotten to turn it off. I've been good about changing the oil regularly, but that's been about it. As I told my mother-in-law as she and I were talking about its reliability, "It's not going to die. I'll have to take it out back and beat it with a bat before that happens."

That was last Saturday. The following Monday morning, I looked at my car. The windshield was covered with frost . . . except for a half-dozen small oval-shaped clear spots at its base, about where the defroster vents are. Now, I'm certain that there's some empirically-testable explanation for this. But as I looked at the windshield, I remembered what I had told my mother-in-law the previous Saturday, and I found myself thinking, "It's breathing. It's actually breathing."