NOTEBOOK -- steve marble

I described my car in painful detail to the guy from the nonprofit

agency.

Brown. Nissan. Sentra. Has a hatchback. Has a ...

“Does it run?

Yeah.

“Tires?”

Oh yeah. Four.

“Mileage?”

I clicked off all six numbers for him.

“Any damage?”

Uh, ouch. Sure, a bit.

Suddenly, I could see it all slipping away. My old car, the one that

seemingly has been falling apart since it rolled off the assembly line in

1987 and first sputtered down the road, rejected by a charity. The final

insult.

The guy told me that not every car in the world is “suitable” to be given

to charity, that he had some people he had to talk with first, see how it

measured up. He’d get back to me. That’s what he said.

I hung up the phone. I envisioned some United Way committee sitting

around a small conference table in a sun-splashed room, doubled up with

laughter as they poured over the description of my car, my feeble

offering.

My car and I have had an uneasy relationship since the start. If it was a

person, I’d say it was that neighborhood punk who’d trip you when you

were running to class, or put a “kick me” sign on your back, or unscrew

the top from the pepper shaker before your salad arrived.

It’s hard to remember when things started going wrong with the car. The

side mirror rattled off one day on a trip to L.A. The glove compartment

-- the entire thing -- fell off one morning on the way to work. The

windshield wipers would flip on when I made a left-hand turn. The armrest

-- one of the few features of creature comfort in the car -- snapped in

half one day, hanging there sadly like ears on a beagle.

At times the car seemed to have a mind of its own. One day it rolled out

into the middle of Harbor Boulevard while I was inside a neighborhood

shop, waiting on a sandwich. I would have been none the wiser had the kid

making my sandwich not glanced up.

“That your car?”

I turned around. The traffic was backed up on Harbor, horns honking,

drivers trying to squeeze past the old Nissan.

Yeah, I said. That would be my car.

Freeways seemed to bring out the rascal in the car. Cruising -- slowly,

as always -- in the traffic one morning, a hubcap shook loose from the

car and went shooting down the freeway like skeet at a firing range,

actually passing my car before it bounced up in the air and slammed down

onto my windshield, cracking it.

One day I gave the car to my son -- passing on the legacy, as it were. I

figured it would get him to school and back and would be such a loathsome

ride that he would never stray very far from home.

It treated him no better. The emergency brake went out, forcing him to

carry a pair of bricks in the trunk to slide behind the wheels so the car

wouldn’t get away from him.

The trunk itself broke one day and would fly open at will. He was on the

high school soccer team and had agreed -- not sure why -- to transport

the soccer balls to practice. But, naturally, they disappeared when the

trunk flew open as he was taking on a particularly nasty speed bump, the

balls bouncing out into an intersection.

One day someone took a rock and finished off the windshield. Ryan said it

was probably the handiwork of surfers in San Clemente who didn’t like

outsiders invading their turf. Me? I think someone just found the car to

be offensive.

And I certainly understood that.

Selling the car was out of the question. A neighbor suggested I give it

to the high school, let the kids in the auto shop class try to make sense

of the thing. But I figured with my daughter just a freshman, I’d have to

live with the knowledge that it was still there in the neighborhood,

lurking. It didn’t seem right.

That’s when the charity idea popped up. Just give it away and hope that

people much wiser and kinder and gentler than I could put it to some

practical use. The car might even be able to redeem itself.

But as I waited for the charity’s car committee to hand down its

decision, I accepted the possibility of defeat, conceded that the car

might get the last laugh after all and be rejected by the charity. My

car, mocking me.

The phone rang on a Saturday morning and a man said that after much

deliberation, they would accept the car. He sounded as if it had been a

tough call -- a hung jury, maybe. He said a guy named Hank would pick it

up the next morning.

I never saw Hank, but by the time I came home from work the next day, it

was gone, the only lingering memory a massive oil stain where it had been

parked.

Acts of charity are fulfilling, cleansing moments when you feel good

about yourself and your ability to help out your brother. Sad to say, I

felt relief. That was all. Pure relief.

* STEVE MARBLE is the managing editor of Times Community News and can be

reached at o7 Steve.Marble@latimes.comf7 .