For an Aging British Roadster, Old Girl Is Tops (Up or Down) in Our Climate

My year is defined by two seasons. Top up. Top down. This month marks the equinox.

Because I drive a relic, putting the top down for the dry season is a rite of passage. My car is a ’64 MGB. It was a car years before I was a licensable driver.

Like me, my car is simple and basic. Its amenities date from the vehicular Jurassic period. Mono-speed windshield wipers. Airplane-style seat belts. An engine.

My car, Elizabeth, is unencumbered by distractions such as emergency flashers, automatic choke or even armrests. You can’t even lock the passenger door from the inside, not because the lock doesn’t work anymore, but because there is no lock latch. Must be a British thing. While the owner’s manual curiously describes the car’s “windshield” instead of the Anglophile “wind screen,” it also refers to its “bonnet,” “carburetters” and “tyres.” (The original manual, now yellowed and oil-stained, is still legible, provided you can translate from the queen’s English.)

I’m just grateful that the folks at Morris Garage remembered to put my steering wheel on the left.

As a commuter, I greet the open summer sky not with the flick of a button that sends the top whirring automatically into its rear nook, but with a can of WD-40 and a whole lot of elbow grease. There’s a lot of tugging and groaning and cursing, and eventually the black fake-leather top is tucked into its summer bed behind the black fake-leather seats (with fetching white piping). Then I wrestle with the black fake-leather tonneau (a flat sheet that, when the car is parked, protects the opening from the sun and weary jacaranda blossoms), snapping it smartly into place as tight as a top on Tupperware.

In summer, my classic roadster turns into a blow dryer.

If the weather holds, I can dry and wind-comb my hair until Halloween, when the top gets latched back onto the windshield. In the 18 years that I have owned the car, I recall 1994 as a banner year--I went topless until Thanksgiving, which might have had less to do with the weather than the fact that I was renovating my house, rendering Elizabeth a conveyor of rain gutters and screen doors from Home Depot to the construction site.

In summer, I buy a lot of sunscreen, sweat through a couple of visors and stock up on coolant. Because Elizabeth--the queen, the car--is an old lady; she’s cranky in hot weather, and given to overheating and the occasional swoon.

During one recent such incident, I sought treatment from Juda, an MG medic from Israel to whom I’ve become so close that his wife, Idith, sends me Rosh Hashana cards and once gave me a recipe for potato latkes.

Another patron that day, next of kin to a dyspeptic Jaguar, asked me, “You know why the English don’t manufacture computers?” “No,” I said. “Why?”

“Because they can’t figure out how to make them leak oil.”

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Drive Time columnist Mary McNamara is on maternity leave. She returns next month.