For your Friday reading, guest blogger Kitty offers us this look at her automotive history:

I’m 38, married, with a real job and a kid, and yet I’ve somehow missed out on this grown-up experience: Shopping for a car.

Out of college, I ended up with the family car, a Vista wagon that had an extra row of seats in the back (this was an exciting feature at the time). One winter, it also emitted an odd rattle and a putrid smell every time we turned on the heat. The mystery was solved one December morn when two perfectly mummified mice popped out of the heat vent.

When I met my future husband, he also had the former family car, a ‘77 Buick with acres of red velvet interior, curiously scented. He told my parents that he didn’t really drive it that much; mostly just to the gas station and back.

It was Our First Car, and in the end, it committed suicide because we wouldn’t let it go. First, the windshield wipers started fighting, slapping each other furiously when it rained. Then the heat went out. Then most of the doors quit opening. We perservered; a tire fell off when we tried to push it across the street during a snow emergency. The coup de grace: It stopped going forward. We considered driving it in reverse to a donation center, but the back windshield frosted over the moment anyone breathed.

We spent money on our next couple of cars, but never over $1,000. Our friend who’s a pastor/mechanic sold us two cars strong on the quirks of personality we had come to expect in a vehicle. One was a black, smallish two-door (I’m not good with names), notable for its capacious headroom despite its limited footroom. A kindly nun came to the rescue when it quit at the top of the Franklin Av. hill in Prospect Park. The other was a Datsun, very cute, that beeped like a big truck when you put it in reverse. That’s because reverse was where first gear should be, so it was really a helpful reminder. Both wound up at Newgate, where all good but needy cars go to be rehabilitated, or that’s what we tell ourselves.

Next, we paid $1 for our friends’ Escort, named Gabby. She had low mileage, but she was a noisy girl, and flashy, too – the “check engine” light flashed on at inexplicable intervals. She went to the Badlands and Lake Vermilion and Chicago and Danbury, Wis., with little complaint, even sweetly waiting until I was positioned on a gentle slope above a gas station to shut down her alternator. Her downfall came the day after our son was born. My dad handed us the key to his beloved car, a white Golf, cute and tiny just like our new baby. Dad said he wanted his new grandbaby not to fall through the hole in the back seat floor, nor suck fumes into his brand-new lungs.

Now, as baby approaches 3, our mechanic pronounced the words we hate to hear: “Sure, I can fix it [clutch, exhaust and brakes], but your car’s not worth that much.” And so we have come to this day, after puzzled hours spent on craigslist and CarSoup, when we are purchasing a car from someone we don’t know for more cash than we keep around the house. We’re so grown up.

Had any quirky cars? Bet you have some stories…

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 6:05 am and is filed under Scenes and stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.