Today is Saturday, November 30, 2024. I hope everyone’s Thanksgiving was bountiful, joyous, and without rancor. Mine was quite bountiful in that Elliot and I were treated to our friend’s Thanksgiving brunch at the West Side Tennis Club right here in Forest Hills. And we didn’t even have leftovers to occupy us for several days. The meal was served buffet style and there was a lot to choose from: salad, soups, turkey, sirloin steak, mashed potatoes, green beans, carrots, pies, chocolate cake, carrot cake, and fruit salad. If you recall, I wrote on Wednesday that “Patricia” put a ban on us discussing the election or Dump and, as expected, the ban was ignored as we all dove into the topic over our turkey dinners. I don’t recall who began discussing the topic; I know I tried to avoid it as best as I could, but I could have easily predicted that someone would have brought it up anyway, and one of us certainly did. Patricia warned us that we could have been surrounded by Dump voters in the dining room, and we probably were. There were so many people in chic clothing having dinner at the country club that this would have definitely been their milieu, given how well off the crowd looked. I could have been wrong since I was not prepared to take a survey over pumpkin pie – which was not served.

The reason I was absent from these pages the last two days is that I fell into the rabbit hole of buying a car with the assistance of my son “Joshua” who was home in New York visiting his mother for the holiday. I asked him if he could go with us on Friday if he were available, and he agreed to do so. However, Elliot preferred to stay home for some strange reason, and it was I who picked him up and drove first to a Mazda dealer (Elliot was opposed to even looking at that brand car and that’s the reason he decided to stay home) and then to a Subaru dealer, both located on Northern Boulevard. My son did not hide his partiality toward the Mazda CX-5 and this is the vehicle that I eventually test drove. However, this was the only 2024 model the dealership had and I was not impressed with the color of the car. We also had to wait close to a half hour or longer for the “brand specialist” to get the car to the showroom. I believe we were at the dealership for close to an hour.

Then we drove to the Subaru dealership located within 20 minutes of the Mazda dealership. From that time on – the minute we entered the dealership in the afternoon to about 5 today, I have been in a dizzying whirl over the process of purchasing a new vehicle that includes knowing these terms: MSRP (manufacturer’s suggested retail price), transaction price, out-the-door price, destination fee, documentation fee, add-ons, extended warranties, and anything else associated with extracting more money out of you. For the rest of the negotiating with our new brand specialist at Subaru, “Jonah,” I sicced Joshua at him – and primarily removed myself from the locus of serious negotiating. You see, Joshua has successfully bought at least 10 cars in his lifetime, more than five times the number of cars I’ve purchased with the reason being that I grew up up without having a car in our small family for a very long time. I would not consider myself a very experienced car buyer at all. I had hoped having Joshua with me would prove to be quite beneficial then, and indeed it was. Before leaving the dealer – this was Thursday – we had succeeded on closing on a deal for a 2025 Forester Sport model. (We did ask for 2024 models, but were told there weren’t any; there was only a 2024 Wilderness model available and this was not really suitable for us driving here in the city.)

Today I returned to the dealership to finalize the deal and to actually pick up the car (there’s no such thing as asking for the car until mid-December, which is what we would have liked since we still have the first car), which included bringing a bank check representing 10 percent down over the total price and seeing the representative in the finance and insurance office, also known as “F and I.” Here I got to sign my life away on a tablet (no more papers to sign; everything is digital these days) and to sign up for additional add-ons (which would jack up the monthly nut we would pay to JP Morgan Chase Bank, N.A.) if I so desired. I learned that all of these “extras” are optional and you don’t need to sign up for anything if you don’t want to. For some reason, we did sign up for just two of these extras: an extended maintenance plan and windshield repair/replacement protection, which probably I didn’t need either in the long run. It did not add too much to our monthly finance charge anyway since we’re sharing the cost. Everything else the representative suggested we could get, I said no to.

I forgot to mention that I did test drive this Forester on Thursday and it was quite a different ride from our 14-year-old Nissan Altima, which is now at over 111,000 miles on the odometer. If we wanted to, we could have run this car into the ground, as they say, and probably still own it another year or two, but Elliot promised the car to his daughter “Emily” and son-in-law “Allan” who live in Silver Spring, Maryland. We were going to drive the car down to them in early December and hand them the Altima and then take the bus or train back to New York, but the weekend we had suggested doing it was not good for them. So now we have two cars; we will have to leave the older car on the street and of course garage the new one.

The two days at both dealerships were very long and tiring. Today we were at the Subaru place for close to three hours; we had to wait until Jonah put the new license plates on the car and showed us all of the new features in it. At one point, we were told we could leave the site for some coffee and I walked up the block to what seemed like a sparkling new coffee spot with Joshua while Elliot shopped across the street at a Food Bazaar.

When it was finally time to say goodbye to Joshua, the sun had set and it was already dark. I asked Joshua to drive home to Forest Hills, while Elliot drove the Nissan back. All throughout the 20-minute ride, the incredible 11.6-inch touchscreen feature was connected to my phone’s Waze app and it navigated the way home to Joshua with relative ease. You can see, I’ve been missing this in a car for so long that I can marvel over it now. You can say that we’ve joined the 21st century then with this purchase.

Oh, the car’s color is metallic gray and I have no pictures of it since my head was still spinning by the end of the day.

Have a nice Sunday. It is going to be cold, so be prepared for that.

And so it went!