Never Can Say Goodbye.

Allow me to share with you the story of Old Stinky, also known as Daddy’s Work Car.  It’s a 1994 Chrysler Concorde.  Count ‘em, that is SEVENTEEN years old, though he has only owned it twelve of those years. You’re wondering about Old Stinky’s name, aren’t you?  We both used to smoke and that smell, even after five years smoke-free, just never comes out of a car.  It currently has 203,000 miles and most of those came from God-knows-what trips taken in it during college.  Finn is obsessed with this stinky heap of junk mostly because he never rarely gets to ride in it, he gets to help ‘fix it’ fairly often, and daddy drives it to work every day.  It’s like an enigma to a three year old… I am pretty sure if he was sixteen it would be a different story.

Dave is obsessed too.  I am pretty sure he’s got it worse than Finn.

I get it.  Sort of. 

Twelve years is a long time to own something.  Nine years ago, we had our first date in this car… a date that I was sure wasn’t a date and that he was hoping was a date.  {It totally was not a date, it was lunch.}  We also had our first real {confirmed} date in this car.  There was an incident involving activity, that I probably shouldn’t admit to, where a certain someone {me} might have accidentally knocked the gear shift out of drive while driving and a certain someone {Dave} banned me from said activity ever again in life because he was a little too preoccupied to think quickly and we almost got into a wreck that would have been very tricky to explain to a police officer.  We took our first weekend away in that car.  We did not in fact, bring our son home in that car because dude, it’s a death trap… despite the romanticized version of it that Dave has. 

We decided that if the car died we would just say screw it and buy a new one because we’ve been talking about a new one for ages.  AGES.  Neither one of us was looking forward to even a small car payment after being car payment free our entire marriage, but we knew it was coming.  The new car will be mine and Dave will get his beloved Chrysler 300 back.  The back seat will finally be crumb free. 

And then it died. 

The starter went out one cold ass morning at 7 am when Dave stopped for coffee on the way to work.  “Let’s scrap it!” I said.  Dave felt ill, but he agreed. 

Until he didn’t agree anymore and found someone to fix the car much cheaper than the original quote and all of a sudden we were keeping Old Stinky as a member of the family. 

What!?!  {Yeah, that was my reaction too.}