I knew that eventually my car would reach the end of its useful life, as do we all. No longer First On Race Day; now it's Found On Road Dead. Sigh. I would make a disparaging remark about Fords, but I have to admit, this car has been a really great car. It's lasted a lot longer than I expected, and not because of anything I've done. With all my cars, my plan is to drive them until they drop. So far that has worked out pretty well for me.
My dad's philosophy on cars was simple: always buy used and never fall in love. With cars, that is. The first part was easy. The second part was harder.
My first car was a 1966 Dodge Dart. Dingy white, of course, and shaped like a stocky rocket. Vroom. Bought it for $500 from a friend, sold it for $300 to a young kid who thought he could fix it up. I drove that thing all over Westwood, Santa Monica, and Bel Air, trying to find the homes of my wealthy custom clothing design customers. I wonder what they thought when they saw me puttering up to their fancy mansions and high-rise condos in a decrepit Dodge Dart. Oh, here's the help, is probably what they thought.
My second car was a poop-brown 1974 Toyota Corolla four-cylinder wagon. Bought it for $400, sold it for $400. I guess if you buy cars really cheap, you can sell them for about the same amount, that is, if they are still running on at least three cylinders, which the Toyota was. That car was intrepid. I drove it to Enseñada, Mexico, with three naked mannequins stretched out in the back. Long story. It's a wonder we weren't busted for drug-running.
My next car was a silver 1985 Ford Escort, a blunt little thing that was fun to drive when it wasn't having computer brain problems. Luckily my boyfriend at the time was handy with cars; he managed to keep the thing running long past its expiration date. I sold it to a guy from Ukraine and sometimes saw it tootling around Beverly Hills, spewing billowing clouds of exhaust in its wake.
My next car was a 2003 Honda CRX (formerly silver, now gray, probably repainted after an accident), the most fun car to drive ever made, except for possibly Minis and go-carts. That thing was a wild little demon. Or maybe I was the demon. It got me up and down the coast, from L.A. to Portland and back a couple times, and out into the wild deserts of Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Phoenix, and Tucson. I moved back to Portland in that car. Driving the CRX was like skidding down the road on your butt, but without the skidmarks or road rash. That was the car I fell in love with. That was the car that inspired my father to advise me to never fall in love with a car.
The CRX, engine blown, died a sad little weepy death on the grass parking strip next to my parents' house and was later towed away by some charity, an event I watched, brokenhearted, from their living room window. My consolation prize was my mother's 1984 white Chrysler minivan, which was like driving a school bus after the CRX. Ironically, that was the year I was driving a school bus out in Gresham. I was grateful to have the van to get to work, and since Gresham was too far to drive home in the middle of the day for the long lunch period, I was grateful there was enough room in the van to sleep. I slept a lot in that van. I came to appreciate minivans as little four-wheeled houses. In my frustration at finding myself driving a school bus in Gresham for a living, I often thought about packing up my stuff in that van and heading south. The only thing that stopped me was the fact that the van was leaking transmission fluid.
True to my mission to drive cars until they drop, I traded the dying minivan for the shiny black 2001 Ford Focus hatchback (plus a lot of cash). I drove the minivan to Milwaukie, dripping red drops that looked disturbingly like blood (I only pulled over to refill the transmission twice), where I handed over a cashier's check and the keys to the minivan and drove off in my sporty four-year-old Ford Focus. That was almost ten years ago.
I used to be able to name all the makes and models of my father's cars. Now I only remember the few that I learned to drive on: the 1960 Oldsmobile Delta 88 whose speedometer was a strip of color that turned from green to orange to red (go faster, Dad, faster!), the sparkling turquoise 1961 Cadillac with the pointed tail fins, and a dark green Pontiac that was memorable only for stalling during my driver's exam... that's about all I remember now of the dozens of cars my father bought and sold in his lifetime.
I guess there is no point to remembering a list of cars, any more than there is a point to remembering the names of all my cousins kids and grandkids. Next year we will all be a year older and maybe a foot taller or a half-foot wider (hope not). Another used car, another happy new year.
