Today, I said goodbye to a dear friend. We donated our beloved, beat up old Prizm to the Purple Heart Foundation (yay veterans!). A tow truck came and took her away early this morning. I promised myself I wouldn’t cry–that is, until the tow truck driver assured me that a lot of people do. Then I let a tear fill up my right eye, a small little tear that I could easily wipe away before it slid down my cheek. Who gets so emotional about a car? And one so ugly, at that?
The funny thing is, my very first blog post ever, written back in October 2007, was about this ugly old car. I dug it up for your reading pleasure (and mine). Please join me in honoring thirteen years of peaching up the streets of Philadelphia.
Parting is such sweet sorrow...
Okay, so maybe it isn’t the ugliest. But it’d make the top ten list, no doubt.
The car I am speaking of–our first car, our beat-up car, our paid-off-and-still-going car–is a 1997 Geo Prizm. But it’s not so much the make and model I am criticizing. It is the manufacturer’s color palette. Our little beauty bears a hue that defies verbal description, a conclusion I have come to after 10 years of parking tickets have elicited a variety of best guesses from the Philadelphia Parking Authority. They’ve tagged it brown, gold, tan, orange, and even “?” The folks at Geo called it Apricot Ice. My husband calls it pukey.
Mechanically, mind you, it’s been a great little car. Internally the same as a Toyota Corolla, it’s still as speedy and reliable as ever, right on past its 10th birthday and the 100,000 mile mark.
And listen, I’m not one to be picky about my mode of transportation. In some ways I still can’t believe we’ve officially joined “the club,” with our lovely leased 2006 Toyota Sienna minivan. I was more than thrilled to assume ownership of the Prizm back in 2002, when my mother so generously gifted it to me. That Apricot Ice didn’t look half bad when it was still shiny and unblemished (or so I told myself). And as our running joke went, it was way easy to find in a crowded parking lot. City living, however, was not kind to its Easter Egg finish.
Five years and untold “love taps” later, she’s not looking so hot. Rusted dings and scratch marks interrupt the once flawless sea of metallic peach lacquer. Our own stretched budget and limited attention span have allowed her to fall into a stasis of sad but functional disrepair; when the A/C belt snapped one day last year (leaving me stranded with two babies in at the University Avenue exit off 76, but I digress), we simply opted to remove it altogether. (After a late-summer drive home from football practice, my husband walks in the door looking like a sweaty death.) The knob on the driver’s side manual window handle is also gone, making it comically difficult to roll it down for ventilation or fast-food purposes. The seatbelts have developed personalities, and on some days conspire against us and refuse to unreel.
For the most part, I no longer drive or ride in the Prizm at all. It has become Kris and Gabriel’s school shuttle, perfectly useful for the two-mile round trip daily but largely unsuitable for most other travel needs. Today, I happened to be driving her for one of her other great uses–to get me back and forth to the train station (so that I don’t have to risk our pretty new van getting scratched and dented by careless Center City parking attendants) and to sit waiting all day at the station’s lot while promising not to attract a single car thief in my absence.
As I exited the train today and watched the other passengers filter through the station’s lot to their respective rides, I almost felt a pang of shame upon approaching my sad, rusted fruitmobile. This is not a car for a vain woman. Besides a fading and peeling “University of Pennsylvania” decal in the rear window, it offers no signal to the outside world of my social or economic status. But as I turned the key in the lock and slipped into the familiar, stained driver’s seat, and inhaled the dusty, old-car-smell interior, pangs of guilt hit from all sides.
Where would I be without the string of old hoopties that carried me the hundred thousand miles it took to get me to the new Toyota car lot last year? Without the blue 1984 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme in which I learned how to drive? (Though I needed both hands and most of my body weight to close its 5,000 pound doors, its tank-like construction kept me perfectly unharmed when I had my first encounter with a spooked deer in the mountains of northeastern PA.) Without the white 1985 Chevy Nova hatchback, the first car I bought with my own money, for which I paid eight hundred well-spent dollars? (Yes, it left me on the side of the road a few days before Christmas 2001, its transmission fatally cracked, just one trimester into my tumultuous pregnancy with my first son–but oh, the memories of that SEPTA-riding winter!)
And what of my Apricot Ice sub-compact? Sure, I’ve probably only washed her three times since my mother turned her over to me (I’ve convinced myself that a thin covering of dirt makes the color somehow more tolerable). But if I’m honest with myself, I’m secretly very proud of my unsightly little Prizm. She brakes on a dime, fits into the most improbable parking spots, and was there to transport my new baby boy and a trunkload of groceries when all I wanted was something better than the bus.
So yes, I’ll admit it. I own the world’s ugliest car.
Here’s hoping she makes it another 100,000.
