So here is our old car, Red Car*, being collected for the charity that would have it, CURE Childhood Cancer.

I needed to find a charity that would have use for a car even if it didn’t run. Red Car did, but roughly and with increasing warning that it would need a costly repair quite soon.

This was the second car I ever bought** and that was about 15 years ago. It’s been paid off for a decade and I always swore I’d drive it into the ground, and, well, I kinda did. This car had endured all sorts of abuse and kept going:

It had also been involved in a minor accident: the car ahead of me stopped suddenly while merging onto a traffic circle, compelling me to rear end him. A new bumper, hood, grill and wind shield was the result.

I actually wanted to try for 20 years, but this model just wasn’t being supported anymore. Parts, when found, were becoming increasingly expensive; when the computer went a couple of years back, we had to wait for one to be found in a junkyard, and then wait for that to be sent back east to be refurbished. It took about a month and cost, let’s just say, a lot.

It had over 150,000 miles on it. I used to depend on it to commute to work, travel from New Jersey to Amherst, Massachusetts to visit Barry and date Kip every couple of months, drove it across country, and so on. It’s been about three years since I’ve been willing to drive it out of the Portland Metro area, we rented cars to go to the coast or Bend.

We haven’t had a working stereo in Red Car since 1996, when the radio/cassette player was stolen a couple of months after we had moved to Portland. I actually wasn’t that upset as the cassette player stopped working a month before that and even the radio was going. The thief(s) didn’t break any windows and left a perfectly good screwdriver and a half a 40 oz. so I felt I came ahead in the transaction.

The floor got quite soggy in the winter. The driver’s side door had been broken for over a year, forcing us to enter on the passenger’s side and shimmy over the gear shift in order to get into the driver’s seat. There was the ghost from the adhesive from a bright red bow that was on the dashboard that a friend gave to me to stick on said dashboard when I first bought the car, insisting it was good luck. The front seats were splitting and the automatic seat-belts cantankerous. The driver side sun visor refused to be attached for the past five years. The cap and switch to the turn signal had shattered and fell off, leaving the raw metal switch to make do with. The windshield wiper arms were seriously rusting. A passenger once compared it to a horse drawn buggy what with its creaking and jostling ride. What wasn’t sun bleached was stained.

And yet I’m kinda sad it’s gone.

*It got named on our drive across country to differentiate it from White Car in the convoy.

**The first car I ever owned got destroyed by costal flooding three weeks after I had finished paying it off and a day before I got the title for it.