Lessons in Wax

            I don’t know what possesses a person to make him enjoy waxing a car, but whatever that bug is, I have it.  Bad.

I can’t have inherited it; so far as I know, my father never waxed a car in his life.  Scarcely ever washed one, either.  Dad firmly believed that if a car’s windshield was clean and everything was in working order, that was enough.  Besides—he was more interested in the places the family could go and the things we could do in the car.  The car was a means to an end for dad, whereas to me it’s more of an end in itself.

So this obsession, I think, is one of those deals that skips a generation.  Case in point: Dad excelled at math and became an engineer, whereas I sucked at math and had the audacity to get a journalism degree.  Now my 13-year-old tells me he wants to be an automotive engineer, and my nine-year-old is surprisingly good with multiplication (especially his “twelves,” which I never could remember).  Neither of them likes to clean anything.

Ever.

The other day, I thought this was all about to change.  A succession of rainy weekends had left the GTO in a pitiable state, and I’d finally had enough.  I didn’t have time for the full wash and wax, but I knew I could squeeze in a quick whisk with a California Duster and a wipe-down with some Meguiar’s Ultimate Detailer.

My nine-year-old, Nick, was in the garage trailing me and yakking away (gabbiness did not skip a generation) when he suddenly declared that he wanted to do the same thing for my wife’s Chevy Traverse.

Wow!  An opportunity to instill some of my car-cleaning cleverness into my son!  A chance to teach him that car cleanliness is closer to godliness than pretty much all other kinds of cleanliness!

Excited, I got Nick his own micro fiber towel and his own spray bottle of Ultimate Detailer (you didn’t think I had just one, did you?), then showed him the process.  He listened, then went to town.  When he later saw me waxing my car’s hood and trunk lid, he wanted to do that, too.  I got him a sponge applicator and another micro fiber towel and showed him the whole “wax on, wax off” process.

After observing Nick a minute, I went back to work on the Goat.  What a great father-son moment, I thought.  We’re both in the garage waxing cars!  I lost sight of him while he was on the far side of my wife’s vehicle; preoccupied as I was with my own car, I was only vaguely aware of him orbiting the Traverse over and over.  Amazingly enough, my chatterbox child was relatively quiet as he assiduously applied his newfound skill.

            The silence ended when Nick declared, “Dad!  Look how pretty it is!  I wanna show Mom!”  I looked up from my post at the front of my car and was aghast.  One glance down the side of my wife’s vehicle—illuminated as it was by the bright sunlight streaming in through the open garage door—revealed an array of wax smears the like of which I had never seen.  Giant sweeping smears, little pinwheel smears, vertical, horizontal and diagonal smears—pretty much every smear in the smear book was represented.  I think there may have been triangles, too.  Perhaps an octagon.  The only saving grace: Nick’s too short to have smeared up the hood.

            Knowing Nick was proud of his work, I just stood for a moment.  Finally, I said, “Honey, I think you left a little . . . uh . . . wax.  Let me show you how to get it off.”  And I wiped down a panel the right way, showing Nick how the reflected sunlight told you whether you’d gotten it totally clean.

“Stop, Dad!” he implored, taking a step toward me.  “I see, I see!  I want to do it myself so I can show Mom!”  So I stopped.  Nick proceeded to take his towel and go over everything again, energy and enthusiasm undiminished.  He probably removed, oh, another 50 percent of the smears before he pronounced the job truly, totally done.  He leaned over and looked at the reflection, as I’d just taught him, and then ran inside and dragged my wife into the garage.  “Look, Mom!” he beamed.  “Isn’t it shiny?”

To her great credit, my wife simply smiled, thanked Nick and told him what a great job he’d done.  The rest of the weekend, she drove everywhere with all the smears intact.  She didn’t wipe a single one of them off.

As I put everything away, I started thinking.  When I wax a car, it’s kind of self-indulgent, really.  I do it because I enjoy it, and because I want my car to look good.   I’ll work tirelessly removing water spots only I can see, holding the car to a standard that matters only to me, spending way more time than is necessary . . . just to make myself happy.  And here were my wife and son, both content with far less.

Or far more?

Nick hadn’t waxed my wife’s car for the joy of waxing a car properly; he’d done it for the reckless, crazy joy of making someone else happy.  Was this yet another thing that had skipped a generation?  Curious: I had presumed to teach Nicholas something; instead, he taught me.