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re: "beaters"

To: <mgs@Autox.Team.Net>
Subject: re: "beaters"
From: "Linda Watson" <lwatson@cnx.net>
Date: Thu, 8 May 1997 00:57:44 -0700
I've been "lurking" for a few weeks, had a lot of laughs, and appreciate
your collective experience.  I was beginning to think I was the only MG
owner whose car wasn't either in mint condition or in the process of
becoming so.  In my neighbourhood the cars tend to be new Jag convertibles,
new BMWs, Rolls Royces, or immaculate classics, and then there's my shabby
'75 B...a lonely little petunia in an onion patch.  Her paint is sad, the
windshield has a crack,   when I changed the headlights last week I had to
use chewing gum to keep one of them in place...etc., etc.  Cosmetically
she's a bodyshop's dream come true:  $$$$.  Come to think of it, a plastic
surgeon might think the same about me!

Last winter I had the motor redone (paid a good mechanic to do it...I've
done my time breaking fingernails and getting grease in my hair. No
apologies for enjoying other things more than mechanics.)  It runs like a
charm; worth every penny it cost.  Next winter maybe I'll get around to
getting the bodywork done, if it survives the summer, and if I have the
money!  When I took it out of the garage a few weeks ago a great piece of
bondo fell off the rocker panel.  Foolishly I looked underneath and have
been scared silly ever since:  it seems the only thing holding this baby
together is faith.  One of you wrote about rust that it's always worse than
it looks...oh joy

I purchased my first B in '82, ten years after I'd first driven one.  (Was
that when I started getting soft in the head?  that's certainly when the
obsession began!)  She was a beauty and I worried constantly about every
speck of dust, any little scratch.  A few years later the Prince of
Darkness must have decided I liked that car a little too much:  the heater
switch started a fire which caused just enough damage that the insurance
co. refused to return the car to B.C. (from Seattle) and wrote it off.  And
I wept.

Eventually I got another.  Not as pretty, no chrome bumpers, lots of rust,
BUT it has overdrive, which works!!   Maybe this is "old fart-ism" or maybe
it's wisdom:  the car doesn't have to impress anyone else because she
impresses me.  The music of her motor is sweeter than Elvis and/or Mozart.

I want to be the oldest old lady in Canada driving an MGB.  My kids tell me
it's already true, and they agree with the mechanic who said that MGB
stands for May Go Broke.  The obsession skipped one generation but my
grandkids, ages 2 to 10, just might have caught the bug!

Happy trails, 

Linda 
Kelowna, B.C.
lwatson@cnx.net
I used to be obsessed, now I enjoy.




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