Dear Mrsatroxi,

My first car was a 1971 Chevrolet Impala. It was my parent’s car, and they gave it to me when I turned 17. I loved that car inordinately. It was big, fast, and old. When gas was under a dollar a gallon, it cost me $40 to fill up. It was certainly not the prettiest thing, since it had been recently wrecked and had bits of another car in place of its broken hood and nose. I had a three toned car. I didn’t care. I’ve never cared about that sort of thing. I loved it, and it was good enough for me. I loved it until it starting cutting out at intersections. Big as it was, it was just too dangerous for me to drive.

So in 1997, I bought, with my very own money, my very first bought by me car. Her name was Lucy, and I loved her more than I loved some people. She was spunky and sassy and peppy and fun. I loved everything about her. She had personality. She had moxie. She wasn’t the coolest, the fastest, the prettiest or the best. But she was mine. I vacuumed her once a week and hand-washed her every two. I changed her oil every 3,000 miles. Every repair, every drop of gas that went into her I paid for myself.

Yes, I know she was just a car. Understand something. Lucy was the first and turned out to be the last big thing I ever bought and paid for all by myself. I was working for something. I was taking care of something other than me. So what if it was just a car? Some of us spend more time with our cars then we do our families. We cry in them, love in them, sing in them, curse in them, laugh in them. Drive too fast and make stupid mistakes. Take them the farthest away from home we have ever been alone. Make memories in them.

Then I started dating and eventually married atroxi. I had a husband and a house and a dog and myself and two cars to take care of. I still loved my little Lucy, but I couldn’t take care of her like I used to. Time went on, and atroxi and I bought and traded other cars, but Lucy was always the constant.

Until this week.

Lucy is now almost 20 years old. She has problems. She hates reverse. She will only take a certain kind of gas. She used to get close to forty miles per gallon of gas, that’s now down to less than 20. She leaks oil and coolant and her paint is peeling off. She keeps having little issues that cost money. She is not safe. Atroxi will not let me drive her anymore, and I worry constantly about him driving her everyday. Do I still love her? Oh, yes, I do. If I had money to spend, she would be going to several shops and she would come out better than new. But spending lots of money on a twenty year old car that only I love is a dumb idea. So this week she gets traded in on a brand new Toyota. A car with airbags and good gas mileage and a whole paint job and no personality whatsoever. I know this is the right thing to do, the best thing to do, the smart thing. I don’t care.

It still hurts.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 9:49 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.