Let’s just get this out there right up front:  I drive an old car.  Not one of those highly polished, fully refurbished, driven-only-in-parades old cars.  This is just a car that is old.

How old?  It has a hole in the driver’s door where you can poke in a key and turn it to unlock the door.  There are no buttons on the key chain that make the lights flash, the horn honk, the car chirp and the doors open.  There’s no USB port, iPod connection or LED screen showing me what I’m hitting when I back up.  The spot where the cigarette lighter is supposed to be has a cigarette lighter.  It doesn’t have a CD player; it has a cassette player.  And I have a cassette.  A couple of them in fact, because I have a cassette player.  No soothing voice tells me where I’m going or whether I’ve taken a wrong turn.  The only voice I hear when I drive is Ira Glass, unless I’m talking to myself (which happens more often than it probably ought to).

There was a period of time when mine was the only voice I heard in the car.  The motor that moved the antenna up and down broke and radio was mostly static.  I’ve heard myself talk and frankly I’m not that interesting so I looked in to getting the antenna fixed.  They wanted three hundred dollars.  So I went to a parts store and bought a generic antenna.  It gets a clear radio signal, but it doesn’t go up and down.  It also doesn’t quite fit on the rear left fender.  I put it up but after driving a few blocks down the street it’s fallen over and is horizontal, pointing out like a curb feeler. Except that instead of guiding me to park the ideal distance from the curb it’s poking the parking meter in the quarter slot.

The car needed a little help studying for its smog test and I began wondering if its parts weren’t worth more than the car.  I drive a little slower past dealerships now, looking at gleaming metal and sparkling glass and wondering what it would be like to have a car that gets noticed for all the right reasons.  Just a couple of weeks ago my old car turned 200,000 miles but its mechanic assures me it has plenty of life left in it so I’ve decided to drive it until it stops.  I’m not keeping it because I am at all sentimental about it. The car doesn’t have a cute name, hasn’t been waxed in years and is washed only when I can no longer see out the windshield. So if I go out tomorrow and it stops in the middle of an intersection, I’ll push it to the curb, slip the house key off the ring, take the golf clubs from the trunk and walk away.

Then I’ll be the owner of a car that isn’t an embarrassment to me.  Probably.  It also won’t be paid for.  I don’t remember the last time I made car payments, but I’m pretty sure my feeling toward them has something to do with why I drive an old car.