In the two years we've owned it, the car has never been washed. I'm too feeble, and Roomie is too lazy, and so we have relied on the frequent rains to keep it clean. During the roadtrip, I promised the car that if it got us there and back again, then I would give it the car spa treatment. It kept its end of the bargain, and so today, I kept mine. While the clothes dried in the industrial dryers next door, we took the car through the touchless car wash for the ultimate scrub and treatment.

The last time I was in an automated car wash, I was ten years old and in the passenger seat of my mother's Ford Taurus, watching heavy, blue strips beat suds into the car with a sound like angry fists. Car-wash technology has clearly made great strides in the intervening years since I pulled into a gloomy, dripping tunnel. Gone are the whirling, slapping blue fingers of the scrubbers. They've been replaced by twin jets of soap and high-pressure water that gently coat the car instead of vigorously buffeting it with sudsy blows that vibrate in the rocker panels and slither beneath the seat. Aside from the rush of water, there was no sound. There was also, I noticed with some disappointment, no corresponding sense of adventure and delicious foreboding. When I was a kid, those slapping blue fingers were a jungle on an alien planet or the bludgeoning fists of a monster. The car was a riverboat or a spacecraft, and I was an intrepid adventurer braving the unknown. The car wash was a chance to exercise my imagination. Now they're a chance to exercise my already-robust inner hypochondriac because they look like a biological decontamination chamber. Spartan and efficient and magical as brittle driftwood.

But oh, the filth that rolled off the car. I had no idea just how much dirt and grime was on the car until black suds started rolling down the windshield in sluggish rivulets. Dust from nine states and the pollen of countless trees and flowers rolled off the car, and when that was done, the robotic arms applied a foaming layer of protectant whose suds were green and lavender and rose, For a moment, I was inside a Wonka car. It even smelled like spun sugar. Then came the precision power rinse and blow-dry, and then it was done and we were rolling into the sunlight like befuddled gnomes stumbling out of a cave. The car glinted in the sunlight, and when Roomie got out of the car in the grocery store parking lot a few minutes later, I heard, "Wow. The tires are spotless now."

So I suppose it was money well spent, though my skinflint's heart quailed at feeding nine dollars into the bill acceptor. Nine dollars. NINE. I remember when it was a dollar twenty-five. Now I know why really old people give waiters a dime and tell them not to spend it all at once. It's because their atrophying brains cannot comprehend the staggering magnitude of the economic changes that the world has undergone since they were fighting the Big One and paying the car payment with a tenner. To them, a quarter was a damn generous tip because you could buy two gallons of gas with it back then. By the time I join their fusty, musty, blue-rinsed ranks, I'll be regaling the kiddies with tales of eighty-eight-cents-a-gallon gas and car washes for a buck twenty-five, and the waitresses of tomorrow will think me a wretched old tightass because I only gave them a measly twenty dollars.

God, do I feel old, or at least woefully obsolete.
.

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