My Honda hasn’t properly prepared me for the maintenance required to hang with a truly magnificent woman. It runs just fine with very little attention. It’s withstood an 11 month gap between oil changes, 3 break-ins, 1 theft, 2 stolen stereos, one smashed windshield, and all the subtle bumper nicks from ultra tight, late night parking miracles on the hills of Queen Anne.

The car is resilient for having been maintained as little as it has been, to the tune of 20 empty coffee cups stacked neatly in the broken glove compartment, doubling now as an excellent shelf. The car’s been dependable. Even if it looks like a Chop Shop’s mascot. It could run off pop rocks and Bath and Body works bubble bath blended with banana peals before it even clunked out.

It’s a low maintenance vehicle, which might sound convenient, but behold a pile of dirt! It also low maintenance and all you can do is sit on it or shovel it from here to there. And don’t let the speeding through Seattle traffic mean signs of a healthy, purring machine. It’s more the laboring hum of tortured movement, like when I sit cross legged for more than 2 minutes then get up quick to answer the doorbell.

My Honda has made me a lazy maintainer. Or, more accurately, I’ve been a lazy maintainer and I have a Honda. O, if I had only the one thing that could prepare properly for the great maintenance called for by marriage. Something as high performing, delicate and powerful as matrimony. The Honda simply doesn’t do. The British made McLaren F1, 0-60 in 3.2 seconds … maybe.

Now a jet fighter … a Jet Fighter the perfect tool for any young man to maintain in preparation for a truly magnifient woman.

See you can’t fly a jet fighter with holes in center or the sides. Or one made of cardboard, stapled together and decorated in broad crayon. You can’t wheel it to Jiffy Lube. You can’t eject in the middle of flight expecting it to fly home and be nice to you later. You can’t smooth a jet fighter over if you forgot to tune it up. It will go down.

Jet Fighters require training and high precision instruments. They call for oxygen masks and nicknames spraypainted right on the nose. And for bravery in the air, all jet fighter pilots get a nickname. And I hereby declare that all husbands should have nicknames too ::: Iceman, Blue Valkrie, Green Hornet, Wild Ginger, Totem Bear.

Little boys at the age of 3 should be given jet fighters to care for in preparation for husbandry and fatherhood. Big, 16 million dollar war birds with sidewinder missiles and bombay payloads capable of incalculable damage. It’d be a model at first of course, maybe out of legos, BIG legos, then gradually smaller, more technical pieces. One needs to be sensitive to the hazards of gobbled plastic blocks by very young people.

Taking care of something so beautiful and complex is a high risk proposal, but anything worth anything, and anything worth You needs to be maintained a million times shinier than the shiniest spit-shined shoe. Thanks be to God that it is that way! And then, the afternoon drive, and the walk down the aisle, are a sterling wonder and every little bit of work worth calling home and telling Mom all about.