Goodbyes

Today, I got rid of my 13 year old car.

I cleared out years of poppies from above the sun visor. (Why? What do you do with them?) I took the tiles from my kitchen reno out of the trunk. I even emptied the maps out if the door pockets.

This car has made numerous trips to Montreal, and has been to Quebec City, Toronto, and Niagara Falls. And during one not-so-good year, it also went to Philadelphia, Gettysburg, and New York City (twice).

It's the car I couldn't find in the airport parking lot at midnight the first time my niece came to visit me, and the car we were in a few years later when she announced "if my mom was here, she'd say that guy is a dumbass." 

That is the car CAA came to unlock on the camping trip where I gave in to complaints about how paranoid I was about my keys and let someone else unlock the trunk.

There's a scratch on the hood, and one of my former coworkers helpfully demonstrated how it could have happened by rolling across the hood pretending he had a box in his hands. (It was actually from digging it out of the snow.)

It has a parking sticker in the window from when I worked at the formerly big telecom company, and a dent in the side from some drunk idiot at Wanda's work.

It's the car we triumphantly fit Wanda's new ikea shelf into, right before we realized there was no longer room for Wanda.

I drove home from my last day at four jobs in that car, and drove to my first day at four jobs as well.

The first time I went to boxing, it was in that car, and the last time I went to Irish dancing was in that car. (I really need to sell those shoes.)

That car has hauled camping equipment, bags of soil, bikes, and dozens of boxes of cookies. 

It was a good car.