A certain majesty

Today I did something that doesn't happen often, but when it does, I find myself getting sentimental, even emotional. It was this: I drove one car to a dealership, and then drove away in another.

How sentimental? In the past, I've saved bits and pieces from my cars and carried them with me in the current vehicle. My first car, a 1984 Subaru GL wagon, yielded a weirdly-shaped running light. I saved a knob from the radio of my 1988 Subaru Justy, the most ludicrous car I've ever driven.

But the practice now seems silly at this point in my life. So this time, just prior to the final ride, I contented myself with snapping a photo of the car, sitting in the driveway on a bleak mid-winter afternoon, looking into the garage where it spent so many nights.

Don't ask me how I can feel emotional about inanimate objects. For one reason, cars are sufficiently complex to mimic life in some ways. But more significantly, a car has been a faithful partner on so many journeys, a companion no less meaningful than a fisherman's boat or an astronaut's spacecraft or the Lone Ranger's horse. A certain closeness develops that, in my case anyway, has more warmth and substance than the relationships I have with some people in my life. (One exception: when my "companion" showed its warmth by overheating in Boston one wintry afternoon three years ago, leading to a very expensive and prolonged headgasket job. And also when the timing belt went, necessitating an expensive repair job. And then...)

And it seems weird to me that this car, a 2002 Subaru Impreza with 189,000 miles on it, cannot just continue to function my car. It runs fine. It has everything it needs to function on the road: not just a working engine and power train, but lights and safety features and so many components necessary for it to hurtle down a paved road 10 times faster than I could ever move on my own, guided only by little movements of my hands and feet. It can still do it. It did it just today, when I shut it off for the final time, the odometer reading 189,357. And it could do it tomorrow for me if I just called the guy at the dealership and said, sorry, I can't make it there until Thursday.

But even so, I recognize it can't continue. The car would need a great deal of costly work to pass state inspection, which would have to happen this month. And the rational part of me still functions well enough to recognize that the money needed to keep the Impreza hurtling down the road any further into 2011 would be better spent on something not as close to 200,000 miles.

And there are signs of decay. A persistent engine oil leak has been making the car smell like a railroad locomotive. The air circulation fan under the dashboard has stopped working (not a good thing in the middle of winter) and only comes to life when you move the air circulation lever back and forth a few times.

And I know this will come out wrong, but the whole process of coming to terms with the reality that the Impreza would not be able to carry on much longer reminded me a little of what it's like to handle the loss of a pet. Yes, it's a lousy comparison, but to me, there's a certain majesty involved in the finality of making a decision that moves you irrevocably into another era.

I try to joke about the change. The new car, a tan 2008 Subaru Forester (the paperwork calls the color "topaz") with just 17,000 miles on it, is the first non-white car I've ever owned, so I say that buying it on Martin Luther King Day was my way of celebrating diversity.

Yes, the new car is fine, and promises many adventures. (Plus, for the first time ever, I bought a car with automatic transmission, so my wife can drive it!) But the old car is gone, even though every piece of it that got me from my driveway to the dealership today remains intact. It still runs yet, but it is no longer mine, and it seems weird that in parting with such a big piece of equipment that I've spent so much time with—a thing that's gotten me to appointments and road races and carried the dogs and done so much—it seems weird the process of changing vehicles in the end is similar what happens when water goes down a drain. Once it passes from our vision and flows down the pipe, where it goes next is invisible, and by design no longer a concern of the present. It's "taken care of." And the recognition of the finality of that—a process that seems unique to the human species—is something I can easily make a big deal out of, which is what I think I'm doing here.

But that's enough for now. It feels good, however, just to put it into words, which is yet another thing that I think makes us human.

And that's truly an odd way to memorialize a car.