I sold my car for $150 the other week.

My mom said she might’ve been able to push the guy at the dealership for $200 but figured they were doing us a favor by taking it off our hands anyway.

The dealership must have a hidden branch of the business that shifts cars that will never be shown on their lot or website—there’s no way my car would’ve been worth trying to re-sell. My parents are guessing that my 2001 Camry will be taken to a car auction where people who don’t just buy cars for their personal use go to buy cars.

I guess they figure they can get enough to make the cost of transportation and just…paperwork worthwhile. $300?

Although I don’t understand the business sense of their decision to buy my 2001, 195,000 mile, duck-taped-bumper Camry, I am grateful that they did. Mostly because that meant it was off my plate, but also because it left me with the smallest hope that my car might not be going straight to the dump to be crushed into a pancake by the guy who falls in love with Hogarth’s mom in The Iron Giant.

Like a child believing that their dog has been sent to a farm to live out an idyllic retirement, I’m choosing to believe that my car will be bought by a kind, loving family who will take tender care of it—maybe even restore it to its former glory in a heartwarming montage of a father teaching his young children the basics of car repair.

Or maybe it’ll be bought for some movie that needs a car to hit with a train. Either way.

I didn’t think of myself as someone very attached to their car. I didn’t take the best care of it in life and I didn’t really shed a tear at its death. But it was certainly a place I spent a lot of time.

My brother Michael drove it before me, and it was the car he used to pick me up every Sunday afternoon my freshman year to go make pancakes at his house. It was the car we drove twelve hours back home to Virginia every Christmas. It didn’t have bluetooth or an AUX cord, so we’d play CDs we’d burned or podcasts from his Macbook with the volume turned all the way up.

When I took charge of the noble sedan in my junior year, it was the car I learned how to drive in the snow with (while giving a ride to three classmates on a field trip to a museum for an interim class. High stakes. Our professor scraped off the corners of my windshield with her credit card before we left because I did such a shoddy job. Humbling.)

It was the car I drove to my internship at the Ford Museum and to church and to Chicago for an Improv team trip (the one where I spun out in a surprise snowstorm outside of Gary, not the one where our van got towed while we were watching improvised Shakespeare).

That car moved me to Ann Arbor and moved lots of college students around Ann Arbor while I worked in campus ministry. It moved me to DC and helped me make more frequent trips back home. It took me to Mount Vernon two to four days a week while I was working as a tour guide. Last year, it got towed while I was in line at the DMV on my birthday.

I’ve done a lot of good thinking and dreaming in that car. I’ve sat, staring at the wheel, trying to convince myself to leave the car and go on first dates and join basketball leagues and visit new churches. I’ve sat in the driver’s seat and cried over being lonely in a new place, in a few different places.

I drove to visit my best friend’s newborn baby in that car. I made new friends by offering to drive to church retreats and back from airports in that car. I wrote an ode to the check-engine light of that car. My mom spent a lot of time spray painting and duck taping that car.

And it could’ve been any other car. I can’t say I was especially attached to its missing hubcap, squeaky passenger door handle, broken gas flap, or slightly leaking windshield.

But I did a lot of talking to God in that car. I did a lot of dreaming and a lot of despairing. It was a place that brought me closer to people, literally. If places can become saturated with our prayers and thoughts over time, this car captured a lot of myself and my life across some formative and change-filled years.

Maybe some of the significance I’m feeling at our parting comes from the fact that I don’t feel fully arrived. Not all of the things I lacked and longed for in that seat have entered my life and not all of those prayers have been answered. Many of them have. But in some ways, I’m closing a chapter without seeing all of the plot points resolved.

But hey, that’s life. And I’m thankful that I got to share six years of it with the stone cold, 2001 beauty my mom bought for $3,000. It conquered mountains and snow drifts, our nation’s capital and the (somehow legal) Virginia Safari Park.

Godspeed, Admiral “Merle” Nelson. You were the best of us. Enjoy life on the farm.

3 Comments

  1. Karen S.

    Well done, good and faithful car.

    Reply
    • Christina

      Haha, indeed!

      Reply
  2. Kipp De Man

    Really lovely, and really relatable. Thanks for writing this.

    Reply

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