This is the first time I've ever gone car shopping by myself. On the cusp of 59, I went for the first time into a dealership and took the test drive I'd arranged the day before. I knew it was the one, knew it the minute I read the stats and saw the picture. All it had to do was run and not sound like there was a jet engine down by the muffler. Just get me from Point A to Point B, reliably. All the car had to do -- really -- was not disappear before I got there. It hadn't, I drove it, and I immediately put down my deposit.
And yet.
Though this is my first solo car, that's not the "and yet" of this story. It's because I'm not getting a car. I'm saying good-bye to a car.
My car: my loyal, problematic, ugly-as-sin car finally, (FINALLY! my friends and family are surely saying) reached the point of no return. It's 21 now. I used to say "It's old enough to vote but not old enough to drink" -- but now, well, it can do that, too.
When my mother died in 1999, she'd only had it for a few months, and it came to me. I'd never thought about an SUV and wasn't quite sure when I first took the wheel. But being a person barely five feet tall, I found the height incredibly useful and its ability to handle snow comforting. We hit it off.
My Dad always had a formula for keeping cars. If you need work done on a car but over the course of a year you spent less that you would in year of new-car payments, then you're okay. That made sense to me. For years, nothing alarming happened. Ten years went by. Fifteen. Work got done, sometimes annoying or costly, but it always stayed below Dad's financial threshold. Around year seventeen, more serious money got spent and it was then that I realized something true: no mechanic would ever say to me what the oncologist had said to us in 1999, that the end was near. It hadn't occurred to me that cars could literally live forever ...IF …. you wanted to spend the money. The other piece, obvious to all, was that I didn't want to let it go because it was hers.
I know that people anthropomorphize things and cars, in particular. Occasionally, I imagined the car with a tail to wag, joyfully shaking its back end like a dog, but really, I had no illusions about it. There was no particular kind of mystical or spiritual energy. It just was.
At some point in his youth, my older son told me that he wanted to drive the car when he got older. I remember telling him that I hoped he would but knowing he wouldn't. Then in June, he began to drive. That kid, now an 18-year old man, was driving -- the car, that car. This past year, too much began to go wrong with it. When the kid began driving it, I realized letting it go was going to break my heart.
Initially, it was the final gift from my Mom. Neither of my sons ever knew her so in a weird way, having one of them drive that car felt like some kind of connection, even if it wasn't. But the truer piece is that twenty years later, I know the stories. When my boys were born, they came home from the hospital in that car. It went down to Florida and back. It has spent more time filthy than clean. The radio works but the volume can only be controlled if you kind of pull the knob out -- but not too much. I have carried loads of gear for trips, unknown tons of groceries, too many seedlings and compost for the garden, and on one occasion, a somewhat illegal number of teenagers, with two stuffed sideways in the back. But we made it.
I made it. I made it mine. Twenty-one years and 166,000 miles.
My bumper stickers will need to be replaced, but that's okay. I have some good ones ready to go.
And your encore? Think about your purchases and make your connections. You may find them somewhere.
For those who are curious, I'm donating my car to our local NPR station this week. If it can serve some good in the world, even in its state, I want to make that happen.
Peace.
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