![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Car Eulogy
Apr. 7th, 2008 09:10 amMy first car was named Dolores. I bought it for a grand out of someone's front yard. It was a navy-blue '86 olds cutlass ciera. It was a tank, and it served me well, but eventually Dunk, my lick-n-stick mechanic up in New Hampshire told me not to bring it back the next year, because there was no way it could pass inspection ever again. Sometimes the engine flooded, sometimes the passenger side door didn't close. There was an entire winter when I couldn't afford to pay to get the heater fixed, so I drove under a blanket and spent a lot of time sick. The roof was doing the detachy thing that elderly cars do. Once, in a fit of rage, I kicked one of the doors, and buried the toe of my combat boot in the door panel.
When it died, I reluctantly accepted my father's help, and went to the dealership that all my parents' cars had came from (my family is hard on cars), and ended up driving away with a white, 2000 ford contour with dark purple insides. Her horn sounded like something from sesame street, the windows rolled up and down when you pressed a button, and I could go uphill and have the airconditioner on all at the same time. I was in love. She was perfect. She even had a warranty. I named her Twat, because I've always wanted that word to have more circulation, and stopped worrying about whether or not I was going to get stuck somewhere late at night. I learned how to deal with anti-lock brakes, and the way new cars weigh a third of what old cars did. She felt like she was half the length of Dolores, and I could park her anywhere.
I bought this car shortly before leaving an awful, awful job. Like a month before. This was the car that transported me to visit Light when we still lived on opposite ends of the state. Hell, this was the car that took me to the Arisia at which Light and I saw each other for the first time in many years. This was the car that I mounted on a guard rail on the pike one snow day, ripping off the side and punching a hole in the bottom, but not totaling it. This was the car that I used to whip along back roads of Western Mass on my way to work, when I used to sleep at Oxygen's because I couldn't handle life in my apartment. This is the car that saw me quit smoking. This was my first real possession, this was the first debt I paid off completely. This was freedom.
But, I didn't want it anymore. Driving makes me nervous, I spend all my time behind the wheel braced for impact. Light did all the driving in Faust, his cute little gray civic hybrid, and we were moving to the other end of the state, in theory to a place where I could transport myself carless, so I sold it to Mech for a ludicrously small sum.
A couple weeks ago, a tree fell in the parking lot of Mech's work. A big tree. A tree so big it fell across six cars, totaling at least one of them. My ex-car. Mech, not being a man attached to material possessions can't understand why I grieved for my little car, and I have no way to explain how symbols work to him, to him it's just a thing. But he snapped the antenna off of her corpse for me, so I've got my hot-topic angry tiki-god still. And it would have been one thing had she served him well and he drove her until she gave up the ghost, but an untimely demise in a parking lot? Gah.
When it died, I reluctantly accepted my father's help, and went to the dealership that all my parents' cars had came from (my family is hard on cars), and ended up driving away with a white, 2000 ford contour with dark purple insides. Her horn sounded like something from sesame street, the windows rolled up and down when you pressed a button, and I could go uphill and have the airconditioner on all at the same time. I was in love. She was perfect. She even had a warranty. I named her Twat, because I've always wanted that word to have more circulation, and stopped worrying about whether or not I was going to get stuck somewhere late at night. I learned how to deal with anti-lock brakes, and the way new cars weigh a third of what old cars did. She felt like she was half the length of Dolores, and I could park her anywhere.
I bought this car shortly before leaving an awful, awful job. Like a month before. This was the car that transported me to visit Light when we still lived on opposite ends of the state. Hell, this was the car that took me to the Arisia at which Light and I saw each other for the first time in many years. This was the car that I mounted on a guard rail on the pike one snow day, ripping off the side and punching a hole in the bottom, but not totaling it. This was the car that I used to whip along back roads of Western Mass on my way to work, when I used to sleep at Oxygen's because I couldn't handle life in my apartment. This is the car that saw me quit smoking. This was my first real possession, this was the first debt I paid off completely. This was freedom.
But, I didn't want it anymore. Driving makes me nervous, I spend all my time behind the wheel braced for impact. Light did all the driving in Faust, his cute little gray civic hybrid, and we were moving to the other end of the state, in theory to a place where I could transport myself carless, so I sold it to Mech for a ludicrously small sum.
A couple weeks ago, a tree fell in the parking lot of Mech's work. A big tree. A tree so big it fell across six cars, totaling at least one of them. My ex-car. Mech, not being a man attached to material possessions can't understand why I grieved for my little car, and I have no way to explain how symbols work to him, to him it's just a thing. But he snapped the antenna off of her corpse for me, so I've got my hot-topic angry tiki-god still. And it would have been one thing had she served him well and he drove her until she gave up the ghost, but an untimely demise in a parking lot? Gah.
