Minerva on My Mind

I had a lovely time tooling around in my new car today. I drove over to Red Hook, then Prospect Heights, then Ditmas Park. I fetched friends and dropped them off. I blasted Aretha with the windows rolled down, zipped in and out of traffic lanes, slid into spaces so small I wouldn’t have been able to fit my old couch in them, and shifted from neutral to fourth in the time that automatic cars take to rev into gear at all. I’d forgotten how much fun it was to cruise around on new wheels. Like, wicked OG.

I admit I struggled a bit in the first weeks after purchasing Minverva. I gave her a grand name–she’s the Roman goddess of wisdom, art, trade, and strategy–but found her dauntingly tiny for a larger-than-life female human like myself. Even her honk sounded more like a mew than a bellow. Then I remembered that I felt the same way about permakitten Gracie when she first moved in, so much so that I used to refer to her as the cat of my dearly departed calico Max. (This is my cat Max, I’d say as he trotted into a room. And this is his cat Gracie, as she bounded at his heels, a quarter of his size.) Now, though she’s still a microcat, she occupies as big a part of my heart as anybody or anything ever could. Which makes me realize: Minerva is the Gracie of cars. I think I’m going to call her Minnie for short–and BB-8 Microcar Castevet for long.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy