Bits And Pieces

Car Swapping Blues

       The old car needs a new battery , a tire or two, or the universal joints are going.  It's referred to as "the old crate" and there's thirty thousand or more miles on the speedometer.  Anyway that "let's trade in the old bus for a new one" look is in Pop's eyes--so why fight it--the family will get a new car.

     It's rather sad though, to part with the family's present means of transportation.  I'll remember the bitter winter mornings when the car started with nary a cough.  Or the way the seats were sorta getting just the right hollows to cradle my back.  Besides I felt it was easy to drive, parked on a nickel and the finish still gleamed like new.

     But it was beginning to need minor repairs, Pop declared reasonably, and that car in the showroom was a beauty.  Why sink more money into this old wreck?  I can remember how it always struggled out of every snow drift and the way it almost drove itself the time Di cut her arm and I made the mad dash to the hospital.  The places we went, the people we visited are all sorta wrapped up in the old car.  It will take awhile for the new one to gather memories of its own.

     We had a gallant car once.  One we'd purchased from  used car lot.  It was fire engine red in a day of sedate blues and blacks.  As World War II came along, no new cars were available.  Nellie went from coast to coast, North and South, East and West.  It took us to army camps all over the United States.  Through a hurricane in Galveston, Texas and a winter of six foot snow drifts in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

     Nellie was my link with a reality that meant home and family after Pop was shipped overseas.  Nellie was right there at the railroad station to greet him three years later when he returned.

     Her tires were recapped.  Her pipelines held together with friction tape.  She took us on our second honeymoon and she proudly wore water saddle-bags suspended from her pockmarked, chrome bumpers when we were transferred to a sojourn of living in a California desert.  Her radiator was known to rival Old Faithful in erupting.

     Nellie had a way of hacking slightly and just stopping.  After a wait, which could vary from five minutes to a half hour, she would start again and purr merrily the rest of the trip.  I figured she wanted to show us that she wasn't expendable.

     It was a sad day when Nellie was sold.  We couldn't even trade her in on the new car we finally purchased when new cars were once more available.  Some young fellow with slickum on his hair and cowboy boots on his feet, bought her for one hundred dollars, and it was like parting with a member of the family.  Ten years is a long time to hold on to a movable possession used as often and as thoroughly as Nellie, or one which held so many memories.

     I'm strictly sentimental over things like:  memory books, old photographs, baby shoes and old cars.  That's why I can never look at our denuded, previous cars on the resale lot in town.

     Driving by in the new, all power expense we've just purchased, I always feel sorry for our old car--spruced up a bit to be sure--but I can only say, I hope whoever buys it has as much fun as we did.

     As for this proud, new beauty I'm whirling around town, just watch your step.  Someday you'll need tires, or spark plugs or an overhaul.  Someday there will be that glint in Pop's eyes again and you'll be the old car with all sorts of special memories--parked in the used car lot.

Written 10/24/63