Brother, Can You Spare a Twenty?
I got my first car at the age of 16. It was a 1978 Plymouth Horizon, white with red-orange interior, named Tristan. If I was running on empty I could take a $10 bill to the gas station and come out with change.
In 2000 I was driving Yoshi the Yuppiemobile. A 1996 teal green Nissan Sentra. I was in Portland, at the Union 76 that's on the approach to the west end of the Ross Island Bridge in Portland (can't, for the life of me, remember the name of the street, but I remember what gas station I was at). I had pulled a $20 out of my purse to pay the nice man who was pumping my gas for me, and I had to go back into the purse for more money before the pumping was done. It was one of those "I'm getting old" moments, because old people always talk about how gas cost a nickel a tank when they were kids.
Today, at the Chevron at 40th and 148th in Redmond, while driving Zeb the Zubaru (a 2001 Forester) the bill came to $42 and change.
It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't all that surprising, either. It definitely helped heighten the awareness of consumption, and may cause me to rethink some things. But that's not why this sparked me. The thing that's been eating at me for the last 6 hours is how do today's teenagers do it?
I'm sure everyone in my age bracket has, on multiple occassions, put $1 or $2 gas in their car. I'm also pretty damn confident that we've all had at least that one time when the car was bone dry and you were dirt broke and you scrounged the car for change so you could scrape together 82 cents to get yourself home. Now, if you're lucky, that 82 cents will just get you to the next gas station. So unless you have a car that spontaneously generates loose change you're plum outta' luck.
And now the reminiscing has seriously gone overboard, as I am thinking back fondly to a car that used to continue to run after you pulled the key out of the ignition.
In 2000 I was driving Yoshi the Yuppiemobile. A 1996 teal green Nissan Sentra. I was in Portland, at the Union 76 that's on the approach to the west end of the Ross Island Bridge in Portland (can't, for the life of me, remember the name of the street, but I remember what gas station I was at). I had pulled a $20 out of my purse to pay the nice man who was pumping my gas for me, and I had to go back into the purse for more money before the pumping was done. It was one of those "I'm getting old" moments, because old people always talk about how gas cost a nickel a tank when they were kids.
Today, at the Chevron at 40th and 148th in Redmond, while driving Zeb the Zubaru (a 2001 Forester) the bill came to $42 and change.
It wasn't pleasant, but it wasn't all that surprising, either. It definitely helped heighten the awareness of consumption, and may cause me to rethink some things. But that's not why this sparked me. The thing that's been eating at me for the last 6 hours is how do today's teenagers do it?
I'm sure everyone in my age bracket has, on multiple occassions, put $1 or $2 gas in their car. I'm also pretty damn confident that we've all had at least that one time when the car was bone dry and you were dirt broke and you scrounged the car for change so you could scrape together 82 cents to get yourself home. Now, if you're lucky, that 82 cents will just get you to the next gas station. So unless you have a car that spontaneously generates loose change you're plum outta' luck.
And now the reminiscing has seriously gone overboard, as I am thinking back fondly to a car that used to continue to run after you pulled the key out of the ignition.
posted by Swankette at 11:39 PM
1 Comments:
We were up to $2.99, but after some newspaper reports of gouging and pointing out MN gets their gas from Canada, we went back down to $2.79.
I remember charging friends for gas if I was ferrying them around, and paying for gas in pennies...
The next few months should be interesting.
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