An Obituary of Sorts, Belated.

Today is Cinco de Mayo. However, since it’s 9:25 in the morning, we’ll ignore it for now (after all, I can’t start drinking till I get home from work, now can I?).

The convertible sold a few days ago. So now it’s gone. I don’t remember ever blogging about the convertible, so I’ll tell the tale now.

Three years ago (give or take a month or two) we refinanced our mortgage, and ended up with a healthy wad of cash in the process. We bought a number of things (central air, a new furnace, weekend trip to the coast, etc), including…. the convertible. We needed a new car to replace my dying Thunderbird, and I’d always wanted a convertible… so we bought one.

You know, acquiring a convertible is one of those life events that makes one feel immediately successful. It’s an automatic status-enhancer. The sun comes out, the top goes down, and the owner hits the highway, sunglasses on, music blaring, and life is instantly better. The boring job, the stresses of life, and all the other miscellaneous bullshit that claws and scratches at one’s serenity…. well, it somehow just melts away. The wind blows through your hair, and you feel alive. Virile. Young. And no matter how bad things get, you always have that one escape. And God knows I used it. I needed it, and I used it. Often.

The car had a few, well… quirks. The seal around the top had some cracks, which meant that in heavy rain it was almost guaranteed to leak some (I eventually solved the problem, more or less, with some gooey black latex adhesive stuff that I found at Schuck’s). The driver’s seat was broken, which was easily dealt with by wedging a mini-cooler behind it. Oh, and the passenger side window didn’t work. Minor inconveniences at worst, more than offset by a killer stereo system, a thumpin’ subwoofer in the trunk, and the aforementioned glory of cruising with the top down.

And then…. disaster. Sometime in August of last year, the car started making a horrendous knocking sound. I left work early and headed straight for the auto shop. About a mile before I got there, the knocking grew deafeningly loud, then came a loud popping sound, then silence. I had the car towed to the shop, where I was given the awful news: it would need a new engine, the cost of which exceeded the value of the car. So there it was. I pronounced the car dead and had it towed back home, where it sat motionless until a few days ago, when its new owner towed it away.

The moving of the car revealed a layer of moss on the pavement, presumably due to a complete lack of sunlight for nine months.

In any case… it’s gone, and with it, a piece of myself. The years are passing with impossible speed now, racing around me like blurry racecars, leaving me dazed in their wake. The hair thins, the body starts to decline, the memory grows less reliable. I’m almost 40, but I feel much older. For me, the death of the convertible represented the last vestige of my youth being stripped away. I wonder if that’s why I waited so long to sell it. Maybe keeping it close, despite its inertness, was somehow a comfort. Now that it’s gone….

…well, it’s gone.

I miss that feeling of wind against my face. It felt like flying.