Hopefully you’ve heard that saying … “Two is one, one is none.” … by this point in your life, but if you haven’t let my situation serve as an anchoring illustration for why it is a good bit of wisdom to stick to. I went from only having one functional car to still only having one functional car when I bought my second Jeep.
The good intentions to fix the old Jeep “someday” wouldn’t help if some sooner day my new Jeep decided to break down. “One is none” in the later scenario. What good would it serve to have two broken down Cherokees, even if they were the same color and all that other boring stuff?
Lesson learned, if you’re going to own two cars make sure they both work so that you’ve always got a backup. And after losing my '84 due to its non-running condition (and my childish negligence), when you have one that’s down don’t leave it like that just because you have a backup to serve you. Get to getting it back on the road. “Two is one, one is none.”
A few years down the road in this story we had some friends gift us a blue minivan as we were expecting a second and third son. And it was nice to have another car, not just to fit all the kid car seats, but to have a bit of family infrastructure redundancy. The '01 XJ had given us years of reliable service, but there was always that hanging fear that we’d be left car-less at any moment.
And that moment would eventually come, and the second car would prove just in the nick of time. Our Cherokee was long overdue for some kind of debilitating failure (it’s a Jeep thing). So when I began to noticed that a sweet smell and a low coolant overflow reservoir were becoming a more and more frequent phenomenon, it didn’t take long to find the reason. Looks like my Cherokee was going to need a new radiator.
No big deal in hindsight, but at the time it was about as intimidating as a broken transfer case. I couldn’t afford to send it off for professional repairs, but I had no idea how I was going to fix it. Yet at least I knew enough to know I had to try.
And sooner than later this time. “Two is one, one is none.”