A FOND FAREWELL
Saying goodbye to his 19-year-old car was more emotional than Shawn Micallef expected,
I said goodbye to an old friend last week, one that has been in the family for 19 years.
It was more emotional than I thought it would be. It was just a car, a Plymouth Breeze at that, a nearinvisible sedan of which thousands upon thousands were produced. They were everywhere, so it was easy to stop noticing them, just as you might a Mazda 3 or Chevy Cruze today.
It’s good to drive an anonymous car; nobody bothers with you.
I was hoping the Breeze would make it to 20 years. That seemed like an achievement for something that is so expensive, yet so disposable. Plymouth doesn’t even exist anymore. The car rolled off a Detroit assembly line in June 1998. You can usually check your car’s birth date on a sticker on the inside of the driver’s door. Bill Clinton was president then, facing impeachment. When does a car become a classic? I was looking forward to getting those special license plates, although my accountant said, for tax purposes, the car was worth about 9 cents.
On my last drive from Windsor back to Toronto in May, a plume of smoke may or may not have emanated from my car in the late afternoon traffic along the Gardiner Expressway’s long straightway near Royal York Rd. I caught sight of it in a quick rear view mirror glance. Was it my car or just my paranoid imagination? It had been making some new noises so I was looking for signs of trouble.
Drivers of old cars know them intimately; every creak, groan, squeak, ping, knock, rattle or smell is suspect. Is something grievously bad happening? Is the car quietly burning away? And yet we rattle on in slight oblivion, hoping it’ll sort itself out as it mysteriously does sometimes.
Yearly trips for the required emis- sions test are anxiety filled, too; will it make it another year? The Breeze always passed.
We made it home, and I drove it down into my underground parking garage where it sat for a few more months. But it was clear it needed some big repairs. We’d reached the point when an old car becomes a volcanic money pit, an escalation from the usual instantly depreciating money pit they are the moment they’re driven off the lot.
Sometimes older cars such as this are affectionately called “beaters.” I’ve had a few. A decade-old 1985 Pontiac Sunbird was my first, with a manual transmission so dysfunctional that it wouldn’t go into first gear without an awful fight. I planned routes to the University of Windsor that had the fewest num- ber of stops while anticipating lights and coasting as much as possible. I also learned if you really jam the accelerator and pop the clutch, you could start in second gear. These are skills nobody should know, but I needed the car and had no money for a new one.
My mental map of Windsor is dotted with places where it broke down and the pay phones I called for tows. When I see people in old cars broken down on the side of road these days I think, “They’re going to remember that spot.”
The Breeze was not a real beater; it was just old. Affectionately cared for by my Maltese Nannu during the first two-thirds of its life, it was the last car he owned before he died and it was passed down to me. He always bought Chrysler as he worked at the Windsor plant for years.
It was very much a Catholic car and was filled with religious objects that I never removed: a Rosary deep in the glove box; a St. Therese medallion hanging from the rear view mirror, and various key chains with pictures of Padre Pio, St. George Preca (a Maltese saint) and the Madonna Tal Herba (representing a small church in my grandfather’s home village of Birkirkara) on them. Perhaps that’s why it was able to go so long without breaking down. That, and some help from whoever the patron saint of indoor parking garages and low mileage is.
I mentioned all of this to a friend and he said the car is like a reliquary, but it’s true, too, of secular objects. My grandfather had bought the most basic model, with hand-crank windows, but it had a cassette tape deck, so I stored a bunch of mix tapes from the 90s in there and would listen to them on long trips and wonder about my decades-old curatorial choices.
Nannu was also an old school sort that took a lot of care of his cars and fixed them himself. A box in the trunk was filled with canisters of Turtle Wax rubbing compound, transmission fluid, engine cleaner and brake fluid, most of them without websites on the label, suggesting they were moved over from the earlier Chryslers he owned. Throw in jumper cables, two full tool sets, starter fluid and road flares, and I could have run my own tow-truck service.
I carried it all, up and down the 401 and around the GTA for six years, and this old car slowly became part of my life, even if infrequently driven. These objects that take up so much space, that require so much infrastructure and subsidy, are so dangerous, but are also where many of us spend so much time, an intimate space. Unless you’re fastidious, they collect things, as a room in your house would, but it’s a room that’s out in public, a private space moving about the world.
In the end, I contacted “Donate a Car,” (donatecar.ca) a service that arranges for your car to be taken to an auto wrecker and whatever money comes from resale or recycling can be donated to one of the charities on their list. Whatever few dollars come from the Breeze, as it’s taken apart, will go to the Toronto Wildlife Centre, the people who take in and rehabilitate injured animals in the GTA. You may remember them rescuing hundreds of ducks during an oil spill in Mimico Creek a few years ago.
Perhaps the spirit of the old Breeze will live on in a few of the raccoons, coyotes and mallards they’ve helped return to Toronto’s ravines and forests. Shawn Micallef writes every Saturday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.