“Don’t fall in love with your car,” my Dad told me years ago. “It won’t love you back.”
This was pretty easy advice for me to follow. I’ve never been particularly scrupulous about caring for the machines that I’ve owned. I view a car as a conveyance – it gets me from A to B. It should be reliable, cheap to obtain and maintain, and efficient.
In recent years I’ve tried to drive as little as possible, using public transportation or a bicycle whenever I can. Having grown up in the prototypical suburb of Clifton Park, I was delighted to go to college in Manhattan. I now live in Socialist Delmar and can work from home most of the time, this is pretty easy.
But my post-college work as a general-assignment newspaper reporter meant I would need a car, so in the summer of 2007 my father and I went to a Toyota dealership. We test-drove a Yaris and a Corolla. “Buy the Corolla,” Dad said. “They’ve been making them forever, and they’re pretty good at it by now.”
For about $15,000 I got my chariot. We got a manual transmission, because it was cheaper. Hand-crank windows and manual locks, because that meant fewer little motors and parts to fail. No cruise control; the ritziest feature was a passenger airbag. After listening to hours of cops calling in traffic stops over the newsroom scanner, I started calling him Eddy after the first letter in the license plate that I was assigned.
Fast Eddy took me everywhere I needed to go, as far south as Virginia, north of the wall to Montreal, on assignment to Maine and west to a wedding in Ohio. We schlepped furniture and children — and even the occasional keg. My daughters and I learned the lyrics to Hamilton from the CD player. I filed stories from the front seat and spilled ketchup on the arm rest.
Over time Eddy’s quirks turned into delightful charms. “Wow, I’ve never seen windows like that,” a tween friend exclaimed, after I exhorted her to manually lock the back door when we disembarked. Like all Corollas of that era, the hubcaps flew away. At a hotel where I was required to park with a valet, the attendant sheepishly came back with the keys when she admitted she couldn’t drive a stick shift. “That’s an end-of-the-world car,” a Canadian border agent told me last month. I grinningly agreed.
In June, someone stopped quickly in front of me at a highway merge point and I wasn’t able to stop quickly enough. I rammed into the back of her new SUV and smashed up the left side of Eddy’s bumper. (Nobody was injured.) We pulled over to exchange information, and I was grateful that Eddy was still drivable. But that was it – I knew that at a certain point a car would tip from working vehicle to money-pit, and it was clear that moment had come. I laughed when the insurance agent asked if I planned to repair the damage or file a claim.
I postponed the inevitable for about six months. (I was traveling quite a bit, if you remember, covering the election.) Eddy started making weird noises. The exhaust pipe started sagging. I taught my teenage daughter how to use Eddy’s forgiving clutch. I stopped changing the oil. He got more than 35 mpg until the last few weeks. The final tally was just shy of 196,000 miles.
After some back-and-forth, our family decided to lease a Ford Mach-E to replace Eddy. I got unexpectedly emotional cleaning all the accumulated junk from the trunk and under the seats. After everything we’d been through, Eddy was valued at $500 as a trade.
I don’t know if I buy it, but they say your car is a reflection of your personality. Mine was simple and reliable; utilitarian and uncaring about his appearance. He left no major impression, and he worked hard. I wish I had treated him better, and shown him that I loved him.
The first thing we had to do when we picked up the Mach-E was to download an app and select a user name. I smiled to myself as I typed in “Mach Eddy.” After all, he’ll carry the same plates.
THE QUESTION: Buffalo blew by the Denver Broncos today in the AFC Wild Card game. When was the last time the Bills made it to the Super Bowl?
Know the answer? Drop me a line at jimmy.vielkind@gmail.com. Or just write with thoughts, feedback or to say hi.
THE LAST ANSWER: John Hylan, also known as Red Mike Hylan, was mayor of New York City in 1924 when WNYC first went on the air. Below is the run-of-show from that first day, which is on the wall at WNYC’s downtown studios.
