Tomorrow, I'm going to be purchasing a new car and leaving behind my old one. It's time to make the change, and I'm excited not only to have a hybrid car with much better fuel efficiency (especially as someone who primarily drives in the city) but also to have many of the modern amenities that cars have had for the last decade plus, like a back-up camera, and the ability to connect my phone to play music or podcasts over the car's speakers.
But there's a feeling of nostalgia and even grief in getting rid of my old car.
That car is a 2003 Honda Accord. When my family purchased it, my sister had recently gone off to college, and given how well we liked her then-new Civic (which we had taken on a road trip to LA for her to go off to college), my mother decided to replace her old '91 Mercury Sable station wagon (the slightly fancier version of the Ford Taurus ones anyone who grew up in the '90s would be familiar with) with the Accord. There was an expectation, though: I'm two years younger than my sister, and so my own college journey was coming up, and so I think the plan was always for me to take the car when I needed it.
I wound up going to school in New York, so it wouldn't be until 2008, when I moved to Los Angeles, that I actually took the car, driving it across country with my best friend.
We got the car in the fall of 2002, so it's nearly 22 years old. It still runs, though it has accumulated a lot of problems over the years that have seemed more trouble than they were worth to fix. For example, the "moon roof," a window in the roof that could be opened with the press of a button, stopped working probably over a decade ago, and there's a gasket around it that's partially popped out that I couldn't even get fixed at a Honda dealership because they apparently don't make that part anymore. The sole remaining key is its "valet key" because the actual metal key part of the primary keys snapped out of their plastic shells, making the "key" really more of a remote fob.
It's really an odd thing: the car is somewhat fancier for its era than the one I'm getting. It has a leather interior (a dubiously wise option for a sunny, warm city) and what was then a very fancy six-CD changer. Funnily enough, it was made in what I like to refer to an "interregnum" between the time of cassette decks and the time of built-in auxiliary ports. My dad tried to instal an Aux input but it would just drain the battery. If you're too young to remember, you used to be able to buy a fake audio cassette that had a wire coming out of it, which you could plug into a portable CD player or an iPod. With only a CD player, I don't really have an option to listen to anything from an external source.
Living in LA has not been kind to the superficial structure of the car. Especially after living in an apartment where one of the three of us has to park on the street at any given time, and where I find myself usually drawing the short straw, it has meant countless dings and scratches as people bump into the car. In 2014 I also got into a 5-car accident (not my fault - it was stop-and-go traffic and both the person behind me and the person in the next lane over were rushing to fill the gap behind me, speeding up to do so while I was coming to a stop because, you know, traffic, and the rear-most car slammed into the car behind me, which then slammed into me, pushing me into the car in front of me - and so on until 5 or maybe even 6 cars were affected. It was some real insanity). Also, a year or two ago when we got a hurricane in Los Angeles, I had parked beneath a tree that I had parked underneath many times, but which this time deposited a bunch of strange goo (I assume some kind of sap) that then hardened when the sun came out and peeled up a bunch of patches of paint.
The air conditioning has broken three times, and I have had it repaired twice, but this most recent time felt like a sign it was time to get a new car.
But I really feel a need to pay my respects. I have something of an animist view of things - it's hard for me not to anthropomorphize objects and ascribe feelings to them. This car is like an old reliable friend - even if it struggles, it always gets me where I need to go (except the time that the gear-shifter broke the exact same time my catalytic converter was stolen - on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, no less!) And we've been through a lot - as I said before, the summer after I graduated from college, my best friend and I drove out to Los Angeles, and it was probably the most fun I've had on a road trip (no offense to my family - two years later I drove with my sister in her Civic when she moved to New York, but there was a folding bike poking into the back of the passenger seat the whole way, so it had its downsides.)
And I'm not here to advertise for a giant corporation, but man were early-2000s Hondas good. My sister's Civic, my Accord, and my Dad's 2005 Accord all lasted the better part of two decades. And my car still runs! But it's getting to that point where it feels more cost-effective (and frankly, just preferable for comfort reasons) to get a new car.
I think the emotional attachment to the car is also because it was my mother's. As I've written about on this blog, my mom died in 2017 after a year-and-a-half-long battle with a rare cancer. Very nearly seven years on, I still grapple with the grief. I suppose that you never really get used to the idea. And it's this odd thing where it's not like she died when I was very young - I was 31 - but nevertheless I had this expectation that I would have her around for a lot longer.
The car has been mine a lot longer than it was ever hers. But she'd drive me to high school in it. It's the car that I took my driver's license exam in. I guess it's just another reminder that the world she inhabited is one that is continuing to slip into the past, one that will be looked back on through the haze of memory and then, later, second-hand stories. It's hard for me to imagine my mother joining all the relatives I never got to meet, like my namesake great grandfather Daniel Ring, who died not long before I was born. The world is going to look a little different - I'm going to be driving around in a Toyota Corolla Hybrid, not my old blue Honda Accord.
And yes, it's ultimately just a machine. A piece of equipment to help me get around in our modern world.
I'm not a guy who typically refers to his car by a name. But I'm also a fantasy writer, so I like naming things. Long ago, in part thanks to its blue color (and one of the minor tragedies here is that Toyota basically only sells greyscale cars now, so my new one will be silver,) I decided to call it River.
So, so long, River. You've been a really good car.
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