Your car has been making weird noises, but you'd rather watch a continuous loop of "The Man with the Synthetic Brain" than visit your local repair facility. Finally, after turning up the radio a few times (to hide the horrible noises(, you bring it to a repair shop to be fixed. You carefully explain the new sounds and the service writer nods sagely and tells you "No problem. Pick it up at four o'clock." Later in the day, you arrive to pick up your mechanical steed and you're handed a bill that's completely illegible, except for the $475 total. You don't know what to do.

You're running a few minutes late for an important appointment. You jump in your car, turn the key, and nothing happens. You don't know what to do.

You're driving down a lonely highway and you get a flat tire. There's not another car in sight. You don't know what to do.

Powerlessness. It's a familiar feeling and one you might experience in dealing with the everyday problems of owning and driving a car. Consider the importance of the automobile in our lives. Most of us depend on our cars every day. They are essential to holding down jobs and running our busy lives. A car is likely to be the second largest item in our budget; the largest, if we don't have a home mortgage.

Yet what really goes on under the hood of your car may be as mysterious as the Transporter on the Starship Enterprise. Why is it so mysterious? Is it understandable only to those with special knowledge and powers of perception? Can only a select few learn its hidden secrets? Of course not.

"Garage-ese" is a language developed and spoken by motor-heads to other motor-heads. Unfortunately, it is also spoken to non-motor-tech-heads. "The Greaseless Guide to Car Care" has been written and revised to close the communication gap between the two. It is exclusively for those who may never tune or troubleshoot but who, nevertheless, would like to be able to speak confidently, to understand, and to be understood when it comes to buying a car or having their car repaired, and further, who would like to avoid unnecessary repairs and overcharges while getting the longest serviceable life out of their automobile.

As the only girl growing up in a family of five boys, I did not learn "garage-ese" at home. Information about cars was placed on a "need to know" basis, and in our family, girls did not need to know. That worked fine until I began driving my own car. I quickly discovered that I had a definite need to know. I had a need to know about new sounds coming from my car. Did they mean a $2 or a $200 repair? Or should I begin looking for a new car? I had a need to know about routine maintenance. Was I doing the right thing by checking the engine oil every leap year? I had a need to know about repairs and pricing. Was I being treated fairly, or did service providers identify my obvious ignorance as fair game? Having almost no knowledge of my car and no language with which to learn about it, I struggled hopelessly with repair explanations and in the end, reluctantly and blindly delegated full responsibility to mechanics. My vulnerability, frustration, and sense of powerlessness ended when I moved to a small Vermont town and, in an effort to avoid starvation, took a job in a local body shop.

There, among the tack rags and paint fumes, while doing general repair work, I had my first opportunity to look inside cars. Engines, transmissions, and brakes began to make sense as I peeled back the outside and observed their basic parts and relationships. All the while, like a three-year-old, asking hundreds of "why questions".

"The Greaseless Guide to Car Care" is intended to pass on my learning experience, sans paint fumes, with the hope that knowing the basics about cars will help you to open the door to car care confidence as it has done for me. And by the way, in case you were wondering, I am not now, nor will I ever be a true motor-head. There are days when my correcto-tape dispenser challenges me. I have never set a VCR, and my microwave cooking is limited to boiling water and defrosting my morning English muffin.

You may not want to change your own oil or replace an air filter, or attend automotive school, and you don't have to. There are honest and competent professionals ready and willing to work on your car. The "Greaseless Guide to Car Care" will help you to learn to recognize them and to deal with them when you find them.

Finding a good mechanic is essential, but it is not enough to ensure good car care. Before your mechanic can diagnose or fix the problem, he or she needs to know what symptoms have brought you and your car to the garage.

"The Greaseless Guide to Car Care" is not an exhaustive work but rather a framework for building car care confidence and providing protection from car repair rip-off. It is also a primer on car care vocabulary and a manual to help you to communicate effectively with your mechanic, enabling you to describe symptoms and evaluate repair estimates.

Mary Jackson, author of "The Greaseless Guide to Car Care" The book is published by John Muir Publications of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It costs $19.95 in the US and $28.00 in Canada. It is available at most bookstores nationwide. If they don't have it in stock, it is easy to order by calling 800-888-7504.