I consider myself a very lucky teenager, because I can proudly say that I own a car. My car is a 2006, silver Honda Accord. My car has, what I consider to be, an old soul, or as most people think of it, nearly 200,000 miles under its belt. However, it is still completely reliable, and for this reason I lovingly call it “The Midnight Rider.” Finally, my car is probably one of the cleanest cars you have ever come across, and that all because of me. I detail my own car.

Now, I don’t consider myself a “car guy,” and, in fact, I really can’t be considered the manual labor type either. However, one of my best friends from high school, Nick, possessed both of these traits, so he ended up roping me in. Nick told me to come over to his house at 8:30 on a Saturday morning so we could detail each other’s cars. I very nearly laid down a flat out no. Who in their right mind would wake up at 8:30 on a Saturday to do manual labor for fun? But, I dragged myself out of bed and over to his house and promptly spent the next six hours detailing my car.

First off, no proper car detailing can be done without a portable speaker and some good music. For this occasion, I decided classic rock would work best. I started with the inside. With Nick supervising, I vacuumed the floors with an attention to detail I had never had when I was ordered to vacuum the house. I was even made to hold a toothbrush in my free hand in order to loosen up any dirt that was choosing to be difficult with me. I cleaned and dressed the center console, dashboard, and the interior of all four doors, making the plastic shine like I never knew it could. On the hot summer asphalt, I laid out a tarp and with a brush and some shampoo scrubbed away at my floor mats, before doing the same to the floors, seats, and the trunk. After applying generously applying the leather conditioner, I had suddenly realized four hours had gone by in a blur of hard work and rock music. The only thing left to do was wash the body, clean the rims, scrub the windows, buff out a few scratches, apply the wax, and then, of course, remove the wax. Easy.

But just like that, two hours later, I had completed my first full car detail. Now, I suppose I’ve left this rather open ended and up to interpretation. You may determine my story to mean that you should take pride in what is yours. Or, you may just as well determine it means that you should do what you love, but do it well. And yet another person may decide that what I have said can be taken to mean that you can find a sense of fulfillment in manual labor. Truth be told, any of these lessons could be derived from my story, or perhaps a person could take it to mean something else entirely. I don’t know. What I do know this: this I believe: detail your own car.