I have never been a chick who cares about cars. I remember one friend in high school who wouldn’t give a guy the time of day if he didn’t drive a cool car (whatever that was in the mid-80s). If I had cared about what kind of car a guy drove, then I would have never had a single date. I went out with several different guys in high school and not a single one of them had a cool car. The guy I ended up marrying drove this (1974 Pontiac Ventura) when we started dating:
The only difference was that his car was baby-poop brown and had a custom airbrushed tag on the front that said, “The Ratmobile.” The bench seat in the front could comfortably seat 8 people.
I drove a 1976 Honda Civic 2-door hatchback that looked something like this:
Only mine was orange. Not burnt umber or sienna, but orange. Bright, tacky, traffic cone orange. My least favorite color in the world. I actually wrote a paper in AP English about my hatred of the color orange. My car was affectionately dubbed “The Tangerine” due to its small orange nature. And because it was small, 4-5 guys could pick it up and move it—which they occasionally did for fun in high school. I never knew where I would find my car.
It was a 5-speed stick with a pull-out choke. It had a shellacked wooden steering wheel and black vinyl seats that burned the backs of my thighs in Alabama in August. Oh yeah…and it had no air conditioning…in Alabama…in August. It also had an AM radio that would go off when I hit a bump and come back on when I hit the next bump. No one could drive that car as well as I could. I knew it. I was one with it. I knew when I needed to pull the choke and when I didn’t. I knew exactly when to shift and I knew how much room I would need to “roll back” on a hill when letting my foot off the clutch and shifting to first gear. I knew to put gas in it every Friday ($5 would fill the tank) since the gas gauge didn’t work. Ugly and pitiful as it was, I loved that car. We packed 6 people in it one time. I packed a lot more memories in it. It died my senior year in high school and I was surprised at my high school graduation with car keys to a brand spanking new 1986 Chevy Cavalier Rally Sport with 11 miles on it. This is me backing it out of the Civic Center parking lot right after graduation.
We’ve had a few more cars over the years. We have bought two new cars and then we realized (duh!) that it is not very smart to buy new cars since you lose several thousand dollars the minute you drive it off of the lot. Since that epiphany we have bought used cars and we drive every car until it literally doesn’t go anymore and it will cost more to repair it than it’s worth. We usually get up to around 200,000 miles on a car. Because I have a self-sacrificial husband who wants me to drive the better, safer car AND because (until now) I was usually doing the lion’s share of transporting kids I have had the newer car. I always refused to have a mini-van. Too cliche for a mom, plus I like smaller cars. The biggest car I had had was a Mazda 626 which my husband now drives. His car died, so he went shopping for a new one. His dad has an auto dealer’s license because he buys, refurbishes, and resells cars for fun and profit. Robert went to Mobile, AL with his dad and they went to auctions to find us a car. When you go to an auction you can’t be too picky. We wanted late model and safe. I did not want a mini-van. We ended up with a 2005 Dodge Caravan.
It does look exactly like this. It was only two years old when we got it and fully loaded with electronic everything, plus we got a tremendous deal on it. It was literally an offer we couldn’t refuse. But it’s a mini-van. I don’t really care about cars, but if I had my druthers, I prefer small, sporty, and manual transmission. Not a large and in charge Mom-Mobile. I don’t like the mini-van for every day driving. It has been a good car, but I always feel like my butt is hanging out into the road or out of parking spaces. However, I am very appreciative of it when we do the death drive from Wisconsin to Alabama/Louisiana. Then it is very nice. The seats recline, there’s plenty of room for all of our stuff, and it gets good gas mileage. It’s really wonderful on long trips. It’s just so uncool and maternal. However, God, as always, knows what He is doing.
When we go the mini-van we had no idea that we would one day be moving to Wisconsin and planting a church. We had no idea that the mini-van (the sexy, silver mini-van as Robert calls it) would end up being the church van and would pick up college students and bring them to church. I had no idea that even tonight I would pack 5 college students into it as I picked them up at the university and took them back to the dorms. It may be an uncool mini-van, but it’s been a crucial part of ministry…which makes it decidedly way more cool. However, once our kids are out of the nest and we need another new car, I thinking this one…
Small, sporty, and stick-shift. Oh yeah!
