An Elegy For An Automobile

Next week we are donating TB The Elder's car.

The car - a 20XX Ford Focus - has made the rounds of our family.  It originally was purchased by my Aunt J and driven by her for years, until it was sold to The Outdoorsman, who gave it to his son (my nephew) to drive.  It then went to my niece, then back to TB the Elder who drove it for many years until 2021, when the driving stopped.  The car then came out to New Home, where it became Nighean Dhonn's car from high school. It went away with her to college last year, then came back this year.

Unfortunately, it has reached the end of the economic value line:  a major freon leak which would require getting under the dashboard to trace and repair and a broken window mechanism means that we would be putting more into the car than likely it is worth (and Nighean Dhonn has other options now:  The Master Sergeant's car, long undriven for many years prior, has now made its own way to New Home to begin a second life).  Add to that it will not immediately pass the emissions portion of the testing (or at least without difficult) and the expense of a car that we do not really use on our insurance, and it was clear that something had to be done.

There were two options of course, sell it or donate it.  I am terrible at selling cars in person (and it stresses me out), so donation seemed like the more easily accessible course.  And the fact that I would be back in town next week to finish the transaction made things all the more handy.

I find myself surprisingly sad about this.

I have written before that I tend to invest things with personalities and emotions; my ability to get rid of  things has always been weak at best and it is simply better for me to not have things than to have them and then try and get rid of them.  Things are invested with memories to me, having almost a sort of conscious existence in that they represent something:  a person, a place, an experience, a moment in time.

The car - for all I have not seen it in the last seven months and did not use it the previous three years - represents - is another tie to my parents, a tie that is now disappearing.

This was the car that for years in which my father would take my mother for drives because that is what my mother, in her increasingly forgetful state due to Alzheimer's, liked to do.  Every day they would take a drive around the back roads of the county they lived in, roads that my father knew well from years of living and working in the area and that my mother always saw as fresh because she never remembered them from one day to the next.  They would stop for lunch somewhere - fancy places like McDonald's or Chick-fil-A. Maybe they would stop for a coffee on the way out or the way home (my mother loved stopping for mochas).  And then they would head back, ready to do it again tomorrow.

But those now remain only my memories, and perhaps the memories of my sister.  My parents - at least here in this world - no longer remember.  And the car, for all of the emotion I invest in it, is a combination of metal and plastic and vinyl and cloth and pieces and parts.  It, too, has no memory.

So next week I will be home, sign the title, and watch it get loaded up for a tow away. I will sign my declaration of non-ownership and wait thirty days to duly remove the insurance.  At some point  I will get a letter thanking me for my donation.

At that point - like so many things in life - the car will pass into our family lore, the grey small car that lived with us and in a way, shared our own adventures and life.  

But perhaps that is enough - in my children, the car will live far longer than it probably was ever designed to.