TIM

It’s always strange, examining the photographs you took “onoliday” when you get home. They seem almost detached from you somehow, as if they belong to someone else’s life, like a blip, if you will, from another reality, an insight into another life that you kind of experienced but which seems to be snatched away from you as soon as you look at it too closely. Real life, normal, everyday life comes along and somehow manages to, not exactly take it away from you, but somehow just makes it all seem slightly unreal.

Instead I click my way back through the snapshots so preciously preserved in their digital matrix on the camera and what do I find…? What was the first thing I chose to take a picture of as I explored once again that massive and most photogenic of big countries…?

The hire car.

Now, I’ll grant you that there is some practical purpose in this. Having just picked it up from the airport and negotiated my first journey through the scary mayhem of the Freeway up into the city, there is always the slightest of chances that, having parked it, you might very well forget which one it was and have to spend a couple of hours in total confusion strolling about a car park trying to find both it and your luggage contained within. It therefore makes sense to take a quick snapshot as an aide-memoire, especially in a country where nearly every single other car also seems to be silver these days.

“Any colour so long as it’s black” didn’t they used to say of the old Model T Ford…? Well, we like to choose our homogeny these days, and silver seems to suit the purpose admirably, despite its statistical invisibility.

After twenty hours of flying, going to collect the hire car is never the most sensible way of starting your holiday and, after the scary old process of completing the paperwork and initialing more unread boxes than I had ever done in my life before, and being at least grateful that the process begun on the telephone back home had, to my intense relief, had not turned into a massively inconvenient cock-up of some kind and left me with two weeks of travelling to fill and no means to fulfill it, we were pointed towards the parking garage with those vital bits of paper grasped in my sweaty old paws where a mysterious man simply pointed at one car at the end of a row marked “Compacts” and said we could have any one of those.

Oh God. Suddenly a choice is required. More pressure!

In the past the choice of vehicle had always been something of a fait accompli. A spanking new green Mustang in ’96, a silver anniversary special edition version in ’04, and something made by Chevrolet in ’06, but now there was a whole row of options in front of me and I got to choose from about a dozen of them.

An instinct for familiarity kicked in. One of them was a Toyota and it was silver, which is much like what I drive at home, so we made a beeline for that one and we bunged the cases into the boot… sorry “trunk”… and shortly afterwards were on our way… slowly.

Such is our strangeness, born, I’m sure out of flat panic (and, perhaps, a need for a bit of a comforting hug) from being in a big, scary new world, we almost immediately called the car “Tim” for the duration, after some of the letters in its number… license plate. Now, you may think that this is a very odd thing, giving names to cars, but again it comes from needing a quick memory aid when you park up an unfamiliar car in a big, unfamiliar car park in a big, unfamiliar city. It always helps to have an aide-memoire and “Tim” gave us enough of the number plate content to narrow it down.

“Tim” wasn’t the most practical of choices as it turned out. What I failed to notice in my haste to select anything at all out of that bunch of choices was that it had no cruise control and that all of its display dials were in the centre of the dashboard. That development is no doubt quite common to some of you, but it was a new position to find such things in for me and took a few days of getting used to. Still, these little inconveniences proved to be less troublesome than I first thought they might be, and for the next twelve days or so, “Tim” did an admirable job of getting us around and about in that familiar yet unfamiliar country despite my lack of local driving skills. America is a wonderful country to drive in, but, occasionally, it’s also quite terrifying to be doing so, too.

I’ll doubtless write at length on other occasions about confusing signage, feeble lighting that takes no account of the setting sun, bizarrely inconsistent driving rules that require a great deal of local knowledge of both the bye-laws and local geography, and traffic approaching you from more angles than you thought possible on the Freeways, but, for the moment, it must suffice for me to say that we appear to have survived, largely thanks to dear old “Tim” and, I suppose, my own abilities to adapt to the situation.

Now, of course, “Tim” will be in other hands, which suddenly feels kind of sad. We dropped the car off at the airport, cleared out our nick-nacks and paraphernalia, accepted the receipt from the happy-go-lucky car hire operative who took the car back from us, and before we knew it, were rolling our suitcases towards our check-in desk in something of a hurry and barely cast back the slightest of glances towards our loyal and trusted transport.

So goodbye to you, “Tim”, and thanks for the memories. You did us proud!