Ain't Sentimental 2016-09-24: Elogy For a Car
Ten years ago almost to the day, I drove home a silver Mazda 3 hatchback. The second of my T-Bird coupes was leaking oil from the rear main seal and I'd had enough of wrestling child car seats out of the back of a two-door, so I went after the Mazda based on a friend's recommendation.
I took our three Tae Kwon Do gear bags to the dealership to test the hatch capacity. At the time, car stereos were just starting to offer some serious digital options and the optional 6-disc MP3 CD changer was a grabber. Much of the digitized vinyl content of WGVC was audited through this device, and by the end of it I was right fed up with optical media.
While waiting at the dealership for the CD player to be installed, I worked on software to bring my study tools up to date for the new dictionary, which was the other big news of the year.
Two highly visible blemishes were acquired fairly early on. I put a huge dimple in the right rear bumper backing into a tree while trying to squeeze into a tight parking spot at one of Matt Hopkins' Philly tournaments. Later, one day when I was driving Noah around, I scraped the rear driver side door squeezing past a truck. I didn't do anything about these because as I was later wont to remark, "The vehicle with the most dings in it has right of way."
Earlier in the year the engine started to give off what sounded like a valve noise. The transmission because ever slightly more persnickety. The AC gave out during a drive to a Memorial Day tournament in Dover and then I noticed a tiny crack in the windshield. On top of all this, the time had long since passed that I was able to get the whole family into it. Oh, and the gas cap had fallen apart a few months ago.
Today it was towed away as a donation to KEXP, a cool progressive radio station out of Seattle WA the whole household enjoys these days when even NPR is largely intolerable.
