my car is like a cat. it has nine lives.

Growing up, we lived a few miles from a busy naval air base.  Our house was in the flight path, so airplanes and helicopters and fighter jets flew over the house all the time.  My dad and brother knew the sounds of the different planes, and I can distinctly remember the two of them leaping up and running outside when they heard cool planes to watch them fly over the house.  It's one thing to hear a passenger plane or news helicopter fly overhead, but it's quite another to hear a fighter jet ripping through the sky, shaking the windows in the house and the glasses in the cabinets, the sound lingering long after the jet had flown out of sight.

The base had a huge air show each September, which meant the Blue Angels and the Stealth Bomber even flew over our house a time or two.   We thought the Stealth Bomber was so cool because it was, well, stealthy.

Tonight at dinner Matt and I were talking about the base.  He grew up in the same town, with the same beloved background noise of F-15's and A-10's, and I asked him if he would run outside to watch the planes fly over too.  He said very matter of factly, "Of course.  You ALWAYS go outside when you hear cool planes."

The base had a parking lot where you could park your car and sit and watch the planes.  My dad would take my brother and me up there and we would watch the pilots do touch and go's, or hope to see a cool one come in for a landing.  Sadly, after 9/11, they closed the observation lot, and the gates that used to be open were suddenly armed with men holding machine guns.  The base closed completely a few years later.

Anyway the point in sharing this long background story is that when I've been driving my car for the last many, many thousands of miles, it sounded like one of the loud, choppy helicopters at the base.

I've even seen neighbors run out onto their front lawns when they hear me driving by.

(Just kidding.)

But I was a helicopter who wanted to be a Stealth.

Thanks to an engine mount that had seen better years, I've been barreling down roadways all over southeastern Pennsylvania for the better part of a year, shaking all the way.  I've gotten used to the shaking and the noise, but for a guest in my car I guess it can be a bit disconcerting.  When Emily rode with me over Christmas, she said, "Laura, this sounds dangerous."

Last week was my nephew's baptism in New Jersey.  I suggested to Matt that we take my car for the drive.  That meant Matt had several hours of time in the "helicopter," and guess what showed up at our house a few days later.

A brand new engine mount.

Matt changed the engine mount on Friday night while I made dinner and at one point he came to the back door to show me the difference between the old one and the new one.

He seemed shocked.

"Look at the old one!" he said, "Watch how it moves back and forth! It is completely shot!!!"

I'm an English major with zero automotive training and I could have told you that.

After he was finished, I took my car for a spin around the block.  I finally and officially felt like I was driving a Stealth.

Or maybe a Prius.

I ran my weekend errands with unbridled joy.  I felt like a new person, just tooling around town quietly and changing lanes without hesitation, because the rear view mirror wasn't violently shaking and I could actually tell what lane my fellow motorists were in.

By Sunday afternoon I was so hopped up on my new/old car joy and the spring weather that I decided I was going to do a major car clean out.  I opened the trunk and all the doors and even brought my phone out to plug in and play through the speakers.

I cleaned and scrubbed and even vacuumed every square inch of fabric until every single piece of salt from the winter was gone.  I was just about finished when my music stopped.  I turned the key to get the car going again, but all I heard was a foreboding cranking sound.

Uh-oh.

I had killed my battery.

My Stealth had broken down.

Matt heard the cranking and he appeared at the front door just as I did. He was thrilled with the dead battery news, as you might imagine!

Just kidding. 

But he pulled his big old F-150 close to my car.  He put the jumper cables on his battery and then told me to see if they were long enough to stretch over to mine.

It was then that I learned an important part of car jumping, which I will now share for the good of the general population: one shall never, ever touch the ends of the jumper cables together.  Sparks abounded!!

Life is never dull for Matt.

As it turns out Matt's truck battery is so old that it didn't have enough power to jump my Focus.  So we had to let his truck run for a while and then, finally, and I do mean finally, it had enough juice to roar Old Blue back to life. 

I'm happy to report I've now gone 48 hours without a car problem.

Everything is, quite literally, running smoothly, in my very own Blue Angel.