A strange thing has happened: my Toyota Echo was stolen and I simply don’t have a car any more. I had one. And now I don’t.
This past weekend, I picked up a check from Progressive, in essence, having sold the non-existent car to my insurance company. In a really disappointing turn of responsibility, I’ve decided to hand the check over to some credit cards and make a real concerted effort to do some debt reduction.
So I don’t have a car, and I don’t have a prospect for a new car, and I also don’t have a pair of Tiffany earrings or a trip to Greece.
That Toyota Echo was the first car I bought myself. Mom and Dad did give me $3000 for the deposit, but after that I forked over the $255 every month for 5 years. I cried in the process of agreeing to make the purchase, as I was terrified of the commitment. At 22 years old, 5 years of payments seemed like a very long time. But I did it. I even finished a few months early.
I keep thinking of the poor little Echo trying to make friends with the mean, scary cars in the ghetto. Or maybe the Echo has just been totally mangled and all of his important parts have been removed, leaving a sad little shell. And what did they to my Dave Matthews sticker?
This car mostly got me to and from Whole Foods, or the West Oakland BART station. It takes me to my weekly session of UGH, otherwise known as my cello lesson. Jessica and I drove it to Las Vegas once and another time to San Luis Obispo.
But when I start thinking of car memories, they generally go farther back… to Red Car and to Gordy. Both of those cars were 10 to 15 years old when they came into my life and they both died in my posession. Both of them were the types of cars to just crap out while I was driving them, leaving me frantically trying to restart as I edged through the toll plaza or down the main drag of my college town. Thus, was I motivated to buy myself a brand new car and never suffer the tragedy of car death again. So some cars die and others are kidnapped.
margaret edith 