a car to grow old with
The car is almost as old as our youngest child, who graduated from college a decade and a half ago.
How old is our car? This old: there are no buttons to open or close the windows. No power windows. The power is you — you actually have to crank the windows up and down, by hand. Yeah, just like they probably used to do with horse-drawn carriages.
The car — to be precise, a 2002 Toyota Corolla — also doesn’t have a rear-view backup camera. It doesn’t have Blue Tooth. It doesn’t have a fancy digital touch-screen display and there are no seat warmers. Nowhere is there a single USB port.
It has a radio, but the radio can get only one station. Instead of SiriusXM, it has a CD player, if only we could find CDs to play in it.
To open the car doors, I actually have to use an actual key. You know, not a fob.
Despite it all — maybe because of it all — we love this car.
Esthetically speaking, the car has a large dent on the driver’s side just past the rear tire, from the time when I once backed into a pole prohibiting parking where I was trying to park. We’ve left the dent there because it makes it a bit easier to pick out the car in a big parking lot from other cars that look sort of similar.
And both side-view mirrors are deeply scratched, a bit bent and stained with swatches of white paint, from all the times we’ve scraped the side of the garage doors as we were backing out.
Oh, and it’s starting to leak oil.
Still, have I mentioned that we really love this car?
We’re not stressed by its imperfections. We’re not overwhelmed by its technology. We’re not worried if we lightly scrape a fender it might cost us a few thousand dollars just to pop the dent.
In other words, there’s no way we’re getting rid of this car, despite its age. And that’s not only because the average new car today costs something like $40,000.
No, we’re holding on to it because we’re comfortable with it and because there is something to be said for old. Like us, the car is a little bruised and battered, most likely approaching its expiration date, but it’s still chugging along. It gets us where we want to go, although maybe more slowly than it used to and with a little more huffing and puffing.
It’s our metaphor car, older and a bit creaky, much like we are, but still moving forward. It may be long in the tooth but we’ve gotten used to it, we’ve adapted to it, much like we’ve gotten used to bodies that can no longer do 40 pushups and run a mile in eight minutes or stay up really late. We’re reasonably content with a body that somehow can still do 20 pushups and run a mile in 12 minutes and goes to bed before Saturday Night Live goes on. We’re okay with our dents and scrapes and splotchy skin and limited braking system caused by our stiffened backs and sore knees.
We accept our car’s quirks and limitations, as we accept our own, and are grateful that despite its age it’s still here, still functional.
So, no way we’re getting rid of it. And anyway, our other car, our new car, is 14 years old.