I had the courage to leave the house yesterday to get some chicken from Popeye’s. With homemade mask and sanitizers handy, I started my car to kick off my first road adventure in weeks.
“Clunk!” was what I heard when I shifted from park to reverse. Dismissing it as normal, I eased the car out of the garage.
While reverse-coasting on the driveway, I started to hear a grinding noise.
“It will go away,” I thought. The fresh air through half-opened windows, the sight of a family playing frisbee in their front yard, and the joy of being in a moving car were more than enough to outweigh my concern about the noise.
“Wow! I still know how to drive!” I started to amuse myself.
As my tires rolled on the road, the noise got louder! I stopped. I got out of the car.
“The tires are not flat. They look okay, so what could be wrong?” I asked myself.
I got back in and drove onto the main road. The noise didn’t disappear, but it got louder and louder!
As I waited for the traffic lights to change, I slowly assumed the possibility of an expensive repair on my car.
“Nothing will stop me from getting fried chicken!”
I then concentrated on enjoying what I had missed in weeks:
• people doing their business
• moving cars
• partly cloudy sky
• vegetation
• buildings
After about a mile, I noticed something.
THE NOISE DISAPPEARED!
I was happy. I suspected all along that the noise was probably due to weeks of unuse. So, on to order and pickup my Popeye’s chicken. I drove home, enjoyed my chicken with gusto, and then called it a night.
The following morning, still unsure about the real cause of the noise, I Googled.
“Cars making grinding noise after sitting for a while” topped the list on YouTube. Bill, a very unassuming man, explained that the noise was due to rust accumulating on brake rotors and that the noise would eventually go away. I left a short comment thanking him for the comforting explanation.
I will now routinely drive my car up and down my driveway until I muster up the courage to go on another road adventure.
