On
the nights I taught at USC or was away on business trips, Bing’s repertoire of
daddy-daughter activities included feeding Akemi tomato beef chow fun at Golden
China, letting her pick out videos at Blockbusters, and making the rounds of the
local German car dealerships. That he would tell her “Shh! Don’t tell Mommy
we went out looking at cars!” made it all the more fun for her. She thought she was confessing a deep dark
secret a couple of summers ago when she told me they test-drove a lot of cars
together. Silly-nilly, I replied, Daddy
left those Mercedes brochures in our bedroom and how else would she know so
much about BMW models?
It
was a guy thing, I figured, and a Leung thing, especially – Bing had a rusting
2002 when I met him and I’m counting up at least 4 other BMWs in the extended
Leung family over the years. But for
those years during which we ran our Mazda 626 into the ground, we really did
need to decide on the next car, and I was willing to leave that decision up to
Bing.
I
was on my way home from a week in Chicago at the October 2000 ULI Fall Meeting,
calling to let them know I was on the LAX shuttle to Lot C, when Bing said, “I
found our next car! Are you too tired to
drive out to Palm Springs? The
dealership has been holding the car for me until you got home.” Bing had hunted out a 1999 Audi A6 Avant
Quattro station wagon which had been driven around modestly by the dealership
owner, which the dealership was offering with new car warranties at a nicely
depreciated used car price. I had never
heard of this car before, but I came to quickly learn that Bing (and Akemi) had
thoroughly scoped it out. Among its most
important salient features was that it was just long enough to be able to fit
Akemi’s Sabot mast and boom inside, with a rack to car-top the boat
itself.
Akemi
could not believe that we were driving home a car from Palm Springs late that
night with Bing having sprung the whole idea on me just hours before, but I was
fine with it. I ended up being the one
to drive it the most since I was doing the heavy-duty freeway driving, but it
really was the car that made Bing happy.
Akemi and I have called it our “happy memories” car – the car which took
us endlessly to Colburn, ABYC sailing every summer, regattas, road trips to
Palo Alto, school field trips. Then I
held onto it so that Akemi had wheels once she got her drivers license. Even though the clear coat was starting to
flake by that point, she was just happy to have a car to call her own, and it
was an Audi, besides. She did not mind
it was an aging one among the new model cars some of her high school classmates sported
about in.
With
every expensive repair, though, I started to mind. With about 10 days to go before Akemi returns
to Boston, the Audi convulsed on her, fortunately in a residential area within
walking distance of home. When I got the
repair estimate, the death knell sounded.
I had recognized I had kept it longer than reason would have
dictated. It may have been just a car,
but it was the last daily representation of Bing in our lives.
So at the end of the most hectic week of the year in the life of a university administrator (meaning I really didn't have time to deal with this, but okay), we sang a requiem to the Audi yesterday, celebrating the happy times in it,
having a hard time biding it farewell.
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