"I love you, blue car."
I said those words spontaneously yesterday and again today. They came out of my mouth with no thought at all as I cleaned out my Glacier Blue 2007 Honda CRV, mailed the title to the insurance company, and signed off when the tow truck came to take it away. You don't say good-bye to an old friend without some expression of what they've meant to you over the years.
I am not one of those people who name their cars. My late husband was. The Chevy he drove when I first met him was known as Kid Blue. The Oldsmobile he bought from his dad was very quickly dubbed Reggie the Regal. He tried to name my cars for me but I resisted. The Nissan I bought a year after we got married —I didn't even want to know what kind of name he'd come up with. It would have been clever, I'm sure, but also would have commented on how how yellow it was, or how it was little but driven by the mighty Gwen. Several years and two children later, when that zippy little car was succeeded by a boring-beige secondhand Taurus, Lon wanted to name that car, too. No thank you, I said. So he kept quiet, as he did when I moved up to the silver Windstar, a mini-van with a front seat for the oldest child, a middle seat for the middle child, and a wayback for the youngest.
Those cars averaged seven years apiece. I owned my pretty little CRV for almost 16 years and 165,000 miles. In December a school bus swinging wide for a tight right turn scraped and crunched the car's body from back fender to front. It was still drivable, but since the estimate for the body work exceeded the car's value it was deemed a total loss, and the insurance company offered a generous settlement. I had kinda planned to go car-shopping at some point in 2023, but there I was, buying a new car in January.
"It's not just a car, it's your freedom." That's how the song went in GM commercials in the 1990s and it spoke truth. Driving a car you can't depend on is the opposite of freedom. You don't feel free when you have to call for a tow from the Jewel parking lot because your battery's dead, or when you spend 90 minutes of precious vacation time in the Firestone waiting room because you blew a tire just 20 miles from home. Both of these things happened to me in 2022, along with other repairs, but these things didn't diminish my affection for my blue car.
I asked myself this afternoon, getting ready for that car to be towed away, what are those feelings that come up when I say "I love you, blue car"? The answer came quickly: what I love is all the life I lived in that car. Helping sons move — to college, back home, then into apartments. Mattresses jammed into the back, basketballs, smelly shoes, bicycles, randomly packed boxes. Driving the 100 miles to Rockford, for a wedding, for dinner and conversation, for a funeral. Trips with my sisters to Michigan, with my daughter on the ferry boat, driving through the Blue Ridge on a beautiful morning in June.
A car is not an animate object. It can't love me back. But somehow it's an extension of self. And Glacier Blue is my color.
Or was my color. There's a shiny new red Subaru in the garage. More life ahead.
