"Mom, you have to buy it!" said my eldest child, Jon. It was a cherry-candy-colored 2011 Ford Explorer, mint condition and with only 32,000 miles on it. My poor old Honda Odyssey mini van had 245,000 beat-dead-doggie ticks on its odometer and was limping towards eternity. I did all manner of polishing it, touching up its flaking paint and giving it wax treatments to help kid myself that it was still professional looking. It had carried kids, scaffolding, paint supplies, sheetrock and plywood all over Atlanta for my decorative painting business, and now I was hauling real estate clients everywhere, hoping they didn't care when I had to run around and give the right side door a big hip bump to make it shut. When it occurred to me that I spent close to as much time in my car as I spent on my bed, I succumbed to the notion of buying that second home on wheels. It didn't hurt that it was so darn cute. My guilt meter went off the charts. This one was just for me, myself and I.
Today, as I made a circuit of the city of Atlanta, weaving deftly through thousands of cars to make it all the way around and back home, I thought about all the cars I have loved and lost. My dear husband takes very good care of the guts of our vehicles. Add to that the fact we've always lived hand-to-mouth and have to make everything last way longer than anyone designed it to, and we've had some pretty amazing longevity.
I learned to drive in a little red and black Pinto (stick shift of course), with herringbone and wood trim on the inside. Daddy taught me at 13 years of age to drive on dirt roads around our house, "in case of an emergency." I bought my first car after I was working full time and going to college -- a tiny gold Honda Civic. It purred like a kitten until Ken plowed it into a stopped vehicle (remember, Ken does not drive -- he qualifies...and they don't stop vehicles in NASCAR). A succession of non-remarkable vehicles followed, until we bought our first conversion van. We are a Ford family. I don't care what jokes are said about them -- we've had the cream of the crop. The mileage we've been able to attain on these "Found On The Road Deads" should shut up any naysayer. It went down this way for the Norton family: our 1st conversion van had amassed 290,000 miles when we sold it to a Latino paint crew. Our 2nd conversion van had 390,000 miles on it when we sold it to a Hispanic paint crew. My first Ford Explorer had 217,000 miles when some feckless fellow turned in front of us and managed to wreck it. Then Ken's Ford Fiesta was nearing 200K when he gave it away to a friend. There's all kinds of excuses for me to buy another Ford Explorer.
One of my former bosses was commenting that it was time to buy his wife a new car, because hers had 100,000 on it. I told him that's when we buy ours. They're good and broke in and worth at least a couple hundred thousand more. Ken's dream would be to retire and buy another one of them Ford conversion vans, take to the road and make the NASCAR circuit. I think we might could do it in under 400,000, whatcha think?
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