Goodbye Old Friend

There is something very special about a man's relationship with his car.  It's a magical thing, really.  An intimate bonding occurs as you spend time with your vehicle.  It can become an extention of you; an expression of your personality and your take on the world.  The body style and color are only a part of the equation. The handling on the road and whether you can drive with the roof open or the windows down adds to the expression.  Certainly the power of the sound system intensifies the experience.  What starts out as a schoolboy infatuation can soon become a robust romance between man and machine.  Such has been my 8-year relationship with the Jetta.

But without constant renewal, any relationship can take on excessive wear and that's exactly what happened to ours.  Unlike the relationship with the missus that keeps growing and changing week after week, month after month, year after year, always getting better and more engaging, the Jetta's ability to evolve was stifled.  She was who she was, and was never going to change, except to grow old and tired.

And that's essentially what happened.  Sometime after passing the 100,000 mile mark, the joie de vivre imperceptibly began to slip away.  It started slowly and with little fanfare.  First an intermittent failure in the power locks, and little pock marks from flying pebbles emerging on the hood like embarrassing acne at the Senior Prom.  Then repeated problems with the front bumper and nagging challenges with bulbs and wiring.  I attempted to ignore the problems and nurture the relationship along, overlooking the wear and tear as much as I could, going as far as using duct tape to fasten the sagging bumper to the rest of the body.  But in the end, we both knew it was a fruitless exercise to stop the advancement of time.  I needed to say goodbye and move on.  She needed to to go wherever worn out and used up vehicles go; to the nursing home equivalent for cars, or perhaps even a cemetary of long ago memories of literal travel in the fast lane.

So that's what happened yesterday.....

It was a beautiful summer day on an Oregon holiday weekend.  I hadn't premeditated at morning's break to do the dastardly deed, but over the last two weeks in the recesses of my conscienceness the sorting process had already begun.  Other makes and models were catching my fleeting glance.  I was eyeing their shapes and lines in ways I hadn't previously, and with increasing frequency was allowing my gaze to linger on a few healthy specimens that continued to catch my eye.  I remember saying to myself, "I need to research that one on the internet" although the impression was so faint and translucent, it never resulted in real action. 

But then on Saturday morning, as I was driving through town on one of the only days in recent memory that I wasn't pushed to stay within the parameters of a tight agenda, I drove by a car lot and caught a glimpse of the object of my recent affection in the corner of my eye.  I pulled into the lot with the intention of walking around the car, looking in the window with hands cupped around my eyes, and just "learning a little more".  That was my innocent intent; however, I would soon learn someone else had a dramatically different plan.

(This is a post in progress.  More to come....)