charliecroskery.com

My last night in Canada for a couple of weeks, and it’s steadily snowing on Kingston in a lazy, big flake way. If I were a Douglas Coupland creation, I would call it ’snow globe snow,’ half-ironically. As far as I know, though, I am not. It’s pretty. I like the way it feels as it freezes my hair into a snowball and my beard into a melting, freezing, melting facecicle.

Once I’d packed for my trip to California, this evening, I decided I should go for a walk in the snow as a precautionary measure, so that if a conversation fell flat in the next couple of weeks, I would be able to save it by enthusiastically claiming, “You know, back home last week, I had a facecicle!”

Anyway, a couple of blocks from my front door, I happened upon a snow-covered wreck of a Honda Civic from the early nineties. I’ve seen it parked downtown several times in the six months since I sold my own Honda, normally crushed under six or seven sheets of 3/4″ plywood or, in this case, three relatively light folding closet doors. This time, it happened to have roof racks, though I judge by the deep dents in the roof that they’re a fairly recent addition. Needless to say, it’s one of these stubborn wrecks which won’t die, and is most likely driven by someone similar. Its default attitude is to sit bottomed out on broken springs (and, obviously, broken shock absorbers), so it must be one hell of a rough ride.

Now, if there’s one thing that four years of EK Civic ownership has taught me, it’s how modular successful vehicles are. Because I can’t help but learn it, I am pretty sure I could list in exhaustive detail which parts from any 90’s Honda vehicle will fit on any other 90’s Honda vehicle — which instrument clusters, for example, can be swapped directly (a surprisingly long list), which seats bolt right in, and even which engines will slip in with only minor structural changes to the car. Accordingly, I happen to know that while the cooling system, seats, windows, doors, headlights, etc. all differed on this ‘92, it fundamentally shared the struts, lower control arms and most of the bushings with my old Civic, a ‘97.

You might now rightly wonder why I’ve taken such care to establish such a throwaway point from a story about a fine winter’s walk, so I’ll explain.

My Honda came to me as a third hand, squeaky clean granny car from the classifieds. It had an unknown history, but a clean title, and very little touch up paint. It was also nearly as boring and frugal as a Toyota Prius, only without any of the cachet or CD player. Naturally, like any reasonable owner of a Honda Civic, I immediately tried to improve on it with better seats, better stereo and better suspension. Consequently, there has for a couple of years in storage at my apartment building been a box of lightly-used Honda Civic springs and struts.

Obviously, I had been walking by this car for months, too shy to approach an odd job man with an offer as obscure and condescending as a complete replacement suspension for his car. Confronting him with such a gift was out of the question, but it frustrated me that what I perceived as a problem and its solution should be so close together and not eventually meet.

So, this evening, under cover of blizzard, I left a cardboard box of auto parts on the snow-covered hood of a car.

This, in my notion of Canada, is how we are: determined to do good, as we see it. Preferably anonymously.