Monday, March 31, 2008

Oh Kitty, my darling... 'tis far better to part*

(*With apologies to the Pogues)


Well, I did it. I finally sold my car, Kitty. And I had no idea it would be as traumatic as it was.

There’s something strangely romantic about one’s first car. I had driven Kitty, my little red Pontiac Sunbird, for well over a decade—some would say well past her prime. The thing is, I knew she was a mediocre car, but she got me where I needed to go (for the most part), and she did so with a surprising amount of fun. Her fastest days were behind her, but we could still hold our own on I-95 and were able to weave in and out of slower traffic with ease. That, and because she was an older car, I was less stressed to drive in the city, where dings and scrapes are the norm and anxiety over them is wasted energy. And sure, she had any number of creaks and squeaks, and driving her was sometimes a test of courage that I wasn’t always eager to take en route to the supermarket (she was known to be tempermental), but, dammit, she was mine, and I knew her better than I knew most people.

Most people, incidentally, were wary to ride in the passenger seat, including my own sister (except when it was convenient for her, of course). The last time she was in the car with me was last summer, when we took her dog to the vet for a checkup. As we drove through the streets of South Philadelphia, she commented on the weird “humming” sound emanating from the car. I turned down the stereo—sure enough, there was a weird, jet engine-like sound coming from under the hood. It had always been there, as far as I knew, but I hadn't really noticed it before, and apparently it wasn’t normal, at least in newer cars. It was just one of Kitty’s many quirks. Others included the inability to open the driver’s side door with a key (thanks to a would-be thief who tried to break in and busted the lock in the process--I suppose my faded Phillies cap in the backseat had a certain appeal), the rattle in the center column when she got up to about 70mph, and, of course, the Mystery of the Cooling System. Over the past decade, I spent probably two grand trying to figure out why the hell my “low coolant” light came on every few weeks. When it was clear that no one had any answers, I decided to do the logical thing: stop spending money on crappy mechanics and simply fill the coolant tank whenever the light went on. Problem solved.

Kitty’s time was coming up, though. The last time I took her to Philly—last weekend—I noticed that the oil pressure gauge was acting up. The longer I drove her, the lower the pressure fell. Not good. And then, for the first time ever, her “check gauges” light came on when the oil pressure dropped to the warning zone. Sigh. It was time. There’s only so much money that I can and should be spending on a sixteen-year-old car. I knew it was finally time to get a new set of wheels.

So on Saturday morning I took Kitty on her last drive. Our final stop was the VW dealership up the street from my apartment, where I’d been eyeballing the new Rabbits on display out front. I’d test-driven a cute little silver one earlier in the week, but by the time I’d gotten up there this weekend, it was gone. I told the salesman I wanted one with a sunroof, and the next thing I knew, I was signing a contract to buy a new red Rabbit. I took one last photo of Kitty before they transferred the tags:

I drove the Rabbit around a bit to get some miles on the engine, and then I went home and had a couple of glasses of chianti to dull the pain of missing Kitty. Godspeed, li’l car! We had a good run.



(An aside: “How did Kitty get her name?” you may ask. I can thank my former roommate Becki for that. When I brought Becki out to the street to meet my new car for the first time, we stood beside her, pondering appropriate names. I don’t remember if Becki suggested the name “Kitty” on her own or if we did it simultaneously, but somehow the name was blurted out and somehow it stuck. Another aside: Kitty was the girlfriend of Becki's car, Zippy. So there you go.)