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October 2009 
Who have you recently been reminded you of?
Posted on Mar 3rd, 2008
by 
Farland
Farland
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for March 02, 2008:
Driving to work this morning I was thinking about my car among the stream of cars. It is the dirtiest, dented stained and it seems to grow smaller as pieces fall off. It would fit right in at a junk yard but looks out of place anywhere I park like an undernourished feral cat. My father drove battered cars too. When my sister was sixteen and me a little younger we borrowed his car without permission. The muffler fell off. We put it in the back seat and brought it home. When my parents went off for a semester to England on a teaching exchange my father left me his car to use. I was a single Mom then with three children. The car was an old Toyota Tercel with a broken starter mechanism. I knew every hill in the area for the necessary rolling jump start it needed. Sometime the children would push. Sometimes I feel a little ashamed, cars seem to reflect ones status like everything else, and my car lives among many big shiny new ones. Then I think of my father and his rusted Subaru that he would never fill with more than $5. of gas because he didn't want a full tank of gas to go to waste if the car died. I love that the roof of my car becomes a small pond when it rains and it is low enough to use as a writing surface when I need to write. It would feel at home next to my father's car. I cried all the way to work and I loved the tears that were my father's.
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Wow, I feel like breaking into a medley of cars I have loved too……especially the 1972 Buick Centurion that I drove across Newfoundland to begin my internship….it totally blew my eco-image so I loaded it down with a bike and a windsurfer for good measure…met every mechanic in Newfoundland on the trip, learned about distributor caps and oil pans and brakes and so on…. maybe I will find my tribute to that car and post it up… I love that your car grows smaller!
farland, you turned car talk into a love song. you are a powerful alchemist my friend. I love you. -dawn
i just read this to adam and he said that HE has the ugliest car in Aspen, his old jeep. you do have to admit that his is pretty homely. I guess I just have to settle for a mediocre, pretty darn dirty and ugly car, since i can't claim it as the ugliest or dirtiest. :-)
and jane– I want to see that post of your ode to a car.
A woman called in to Car Talk, a college student, with the same 1986 Honda Civic so my ears pricked up. She was concerned that it wouldn't make it across the country as it sputtered. They suggested a new or renewed distributor a three hundred dollar job but told her the car wasn't worth it, to ask her parents for a new car, to make it home. My car has made multiple cross country trips. I think the Car Talk guys have grown soft with their success.
Jane, I hope that Ode to a Car is brewing up right now! And Dawn, I love your car and all the memories it holds. It is some crazy storied car. Adams gets the prize in the SUV category.
I don't think I've ever seen a Civic quite that color Farland… do they make that special for moutain living? When my '91 Civic hatchback died, so did a little part of me. Boy that car took me places. Like a Dr. Suess book – “Oh the places you will go” … . But I think my heart will always belong to my very first car, bought for $900 when I was going to college in Santa Barbara – a 1964 baby blue Karmann Ghia. Even though it really never dipped below 50 degrees, and even that was rare, I would still stall out at the first few lights. But once that baby warmed up, I just zipped along loving my life. It was my first stick shift and I've never gone back. My boyfriend was too tall to ever be comfortable in it, but somehow that suited me fine. It was my space. The first space that I owned outright. She was my castle.
karmann ghia is a perfect name for castle. perfect. :-)
fish- do you remember how excited I was when we had that one day in cambridge, mass on the way to iceland and i had never been there before and we saw the offices of car talk? I'm tempted to send them a link to this blog post and comments and see what they make of it.
my car never did get a name, but she keeps going and going. adam takes good care of her, and nurses her back to health when I am too neglectful.
It is a interesting thing that we all have such fond memories of the old clunkers and don't think of new shiny cars that way but why then do the switch? The person who had my car before me called it “The Turd” because of the color. I have seen one other Civic here with the same color but mine has a lot of dirt mixed in. It don't call it the turd. Oh Dawn we need to spend another day or more and more walking around Cambridge again!
yes please. I'd like that. but let's spend a day walking around here together sooner than that. and maybe one walking around in utah. and one over on the rainbow trail. I want to do lots and lots and lots of walking peaceful steps this summer. maybe jordan and/or adam will join us for some of it.
and please, dawn and farland, if you walk around cambridge, call me so that i might walk with you. i promise tea and cookies at the end : )
We will we will… I am driving East in June for three weeks or so (in the civic). I would love to spend a day or so in Cambridge. And guess what? Sticky and Gnomi are coming too.
i'm not going with you in june…. :-( I'll be just back from norway and working my butt off to save for the next adventure. but someday/year I'll come along. you all can post pics of the june adventure and then work won't seem so tedious. :-)
Me, too! I drive a 93 Geo with 193 thousand miles on it. I pulled up to a stop sign the other day and a piece of the engine fell off on the street, so I tossed it in the trunk (the hatchback doesn't latch). The car runs fine without that piece. Still gets 55 mpg. The radio antenna stays on because it is taped to the roof and the driver's side door doesn't open. The dogs chewed the gear shift so my wife made a purple furry cover for it, with a matching one for the hand brake and a steering wheel cover. It has a bumper sticker that says, “Live Your Own Myth.” ;)
I love that sentiment, “live your own myth”. that is awesome. I'm going to remind myself of that as often as possible.
I often forget that there is a bumper sticker on my car's backend that says, “it's not how you pick your nose, it's where you put the booger.” sometimes when I'm stopped at a red light and look in the rearview mirror and see someone behind me pointing and laughing it takes me a minute to remember my silly bumper sticker. I had a argument with an ex boyfriend about that bumper sticker. he was with me at the gas station when I bought it and he insisted that I not put in on my car and I insisted that I was indeed going to put it on my car and he was furious. I have that bumper sticker to thank for helping me to see how incompatible he and I were and hence for me being free to date when my current husband came along. (current husband is slightly embarrassed when he has to drive my car, but he doens't demand that I keep it to his own standards.)