Drive

A tribute to my car, the one I bought brand new and paid for myself, when I got my first real job, the one that received its fatal diagnosis two months ago ($1,800 to repair it), the one that stayed in the driveway these extra weeks because, really, why rush things?

It lived through four presidents, two boyfriends, one husband, a cat, two children, three states. It climbed Mount Greylock in Massachusetts and Cadillac Mountain in Maine. It helped me escape the crazy shaman in Floyd County who was trying to convince me to quit my job in journalism and join him in selling NuSkin.

A lot of people knew my car by the blood-spattered “I Hate Brenda” bumper sticker

on the back. I put it on during my 90210-watching days, but irrelevance made it stronger. In Boston, a woman rolled down her automatic window and asked who Brenda was. My husband hand-cranked our window open. “My ex wife,” he said.

My friend Tracy told me once I should try to drive my car until it reached 225,622 miles, the distance between the earth and moon at their closest point in orbit. It made it about ten thousand miles past that. Not a world’s record, but as my mother likes to say: “That car didn’t owe anybody anything.”

Last night, we took it to a high school in Fairfax where they train kids to repair cars. If they repair this one I might just buy it back, though it’s more likely to become an organ donor. I drove it for the last eight-mile ride, taking back roads just in case it didn’t make it. But it did. It seemed to pick up steam along the way. I listened to music that came out 21 years ago when I bought the car, because they’re still playing that music now, only they call it “classic rock.” (Et tu, Nirvana?)

My friend Wendy asked me yesterday why we get so attached to cars. I’m attached to this one because, along with the rubber whale that decorated my first legal mixed drink, it feels like the last remaining relic of my 20s. And maybe because it feels like the last thing — save my underwear — that was solely mine.