Trying in 2014--Minor Torture

Along with its major problems of a death and breast cancer, 2014 also contained a slow drip of less existential pressures.

The first of these was a cancer of sorts in our car.

Starting in the spring, sometimes you would step on the accelerator of our 2012 Ford Fiesta and nothing would happen. Not a stall, but no acceleration. No reaction at all. It didn’t happen consistently—probably 3 percent or less of the time. But it was a scary thing on San Francisco’s hills. And a potentially lethal danger when taking left turns against oncoming traffic.

By fall, we’d asked a Ford dealership to fix the problem three separate times. But it kept happening. So we asked Ford to buy the car back under the California Lemon law. Even though Ford had extended the warranty on Fiestas from 2012 related to the transmission, the company refused. With the Fiesta—party in Spanish—Ford proved to be a party pooper.

Finally, we sued Ford under the lemon law. I don’t apologize for the suit. But I’m not exactly proud of it either. I’ve never sued anyone. Never joined a class action suit. And in our litigious society, I take a small measure of pride in never having resorted to dragging someone into court.

What’s more, Ford had a place in our family’s heart. The first car Rowena and I bought just before Julius was born in 2003 was a Ford Escort. And we grew to love that car. Our little “Escorter” took care of us. Lived up to its high Consumer Reports score, even if it didn’t have a great popular reputation. Good gas mileage. Reliable over 10 years of service. It was the underdog that could. Kind of the way I saw our family—living as we do in a small one-bedroom apartment, earning a modest living as an artist and a writer in a city full of tech tycoons, having slender builds but playing tough in our sports of soccer (Skyla and Julius), flag football (Julius) and basketball (Skyla and me).

The Fiesta at first was more of the same. But also sleek and stylish. Not sure those are words that describe me, but they do capture Rowena. And we loved that it was even smaller than the Escort—easier still to park in our space-scarce neighborhood. We loved the Fiesta too.

Julius, Skyla and I when we bought our Ford  Fiesta.

So it felt like a personal betrayal when Ford refused to buy it back. Ford couldn’t reproduce the no-acceleration problem in the shop, and wasn’t willing to drive it for an extended period to try to experience it. Understandable, but then they wouldn’t take us at our word. Wouldn't trust us. Even though neither Rowena nor I have any history of suing companies, of crime, or trying to scam anyone.

More galling still, I had just praised Ford in my work as a writer. Had proclaimed them as one of the three top “Good Companies” in America, when it comes to behavior as an employer, a seller and a steward of the community. 

So I felt like a fool besides a jilted lover. Ford left me a broken-hearted fool.

We continue to drive the car, avoiding left turns onto onrushing traffic. Our attorneys are confident we’ll win, but warn us the lawsuit could extend well into 2015. More uncertainty. More anxiety.

About the only certain thing about the car trouble is that it has been expensive. We spent something in the order of $1,000 on rental car fees to avoid driving the Fiesta while Ford decided whether to buy it back.

And those fees added to a broader financial squeeze. The sudden trip to Chicago for my mother’s funeral set us back. As did adjusting my ticket and staying longer in Chicago to help my dad get his feet under him. And then came the cancer bills. It turns out I picked a bad year to put Rowena on a low-premium, low-benefit plan. The insurance—obtained under California’s version of Obamacare--is saving us a bundle. The surgery alone would have cost close to $25,000. But we still face medical bills in the thousands.

In addition, I got behind with my quarterly tax payments as an independent contractor. 2014 was the first year in more than a decade that I was fully self-employed. And I knew I had to set aside money to pay for taxes. But I didn’t do so consistently. My mother’s death, car trouble and cancer probably explain this oversight to some extent. But I’m embarrassed nonetheless. I feel irresponsible. A tax cheat light. We’re probably going to have to set up a payment plan to pay off the taxes—something I’ve never had to do before.

Exactly how I was going to make money in 2015 to pay Uncle Sam—let alone keep a roof over our heads—wasn’t clear as 2014 drew to an end. My contract with Great Place to Work concluded December 19. And although I was talking with some of my bosses at Great Place to Work about getting a regular job at the organization, nothing had been finalized by early December.

On top of it all, my body was aching and seemed to be permanently messed up. Back pain that had begun in mid-2013 persisted throughout this year. This despite work with a Kaiser physical therapist and a lunch-time exercise class I went to a couple of times a week. And then when we were in Chicago for the funeral services, I developed shooting pains in my right foot. The foot improved some by the time I was to help coach Skyla’s soccer team in the fall. But then I tweaked my left knee after one of the Chica Cheetahs games. Perhaps because I began to favor that knee, the other one started hurting as well in the weeks that followed.

By year’s end, all of these problems continued to nag me. I have wrestled with many injuries as an adult in the course of playing basketball, running and doing yoga. But most of these healed over time. With my back especially, I began to believe I’d crossed over into a new category. Into having a “bad back.” As being chronically injured. Only 5 years ago, around the time of my 25^th year high school reunion, I felt more physically fit, stronger, than I’d ever been in my life. Now it had become hard to avoid the feeling that my body was doomed. Sliding down a slope of increasing pain and decreasing mobility.

I know car trouble, money trouble and body trouble are common. Know people are supposed to rise above the pain of these non-emergencies. And in prior years, I have been better at bouncing back from set-backs like a divorce, being laid off and both bones in my arm snapping at once in a soccer game. But this year was different. Start with my sunshiny mom dying and my free-spirit wife getting snagged by cancer, and the smaller rainclouds seemed bigger, stormier. The drips of trouble—a Ford rejection letter, a stalled conversation about a permanent job, another morning with a stiff, ouchy back—felt like a kind of cosmic torture.

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