Remember back around November 2007 when I blogged about my inability to keep sentimentality out of my relationship with cars? And how that post was precipitated by our van being totaled? Yeah, I'd rather forget, too. Alas, here I am coming to you again with more car woe, this time involving the most sentimental of my my sentimental car attachments--Indy, our 1995 Saturn SL2.
Friday afternoon I was happily working (really! not even Facebooking, I swear!) when the phone rang. It was Chip, telling me that he had succumbed to cliche and gotten into a car accident less than a block from our house. He was fine--and, as always, that is the most important thing--but Indy, oh, Indy.
But I should back up and explain why Indy is Indy. Indy the name works on two levels--the car is indigo in color, and we always compared it to Indiana Jones in that it got into some scrapes but always came through in the end. It earned the name during the year that we spent living 90 miles apart (me in New Haven, CT and Chip in Amherst, MA) and still managing to see each other every single day. No joke. We put something like 20,000 miles on Indy that year, and during one of our regular trips down I-91, another driver pulled right into us while we were all going full-on highway speed. Chip managed not to hit the other driver's car again and to control our pull-off to the shoulder, but Indy did sustain some damage. Even so, it was easily enough fixed then and we added it to Indy's lore.
Chip's parents had bought him the car after he graduated from grad school in 1997. Since they got it at the Saturn dealership, we got the full treatment--I still carry the laminated picture they took of the two of us in front of our Saturn, and somewhere I have the calender they sent us with that same picture. I'm not exaggerating when I say that we've had about two hours total of worry with Indy. One morning, on the way to Boston to get Brazilian visas, it failed to start. Saturn of Hadley got us in within an hour, swapped out our battery, and we were on our way. I'm pretty sure that's all I can remember as far as "car trouble" goes.
Shortly after getting the car, it was time for one of our many moves. I flew to Michigan from New Haven and helped Chip pack up his grad school apartment, we got a U-Haul trailer hitch attached to Indy, and we pulled that trailer from East Lansing, MI to Washington, DC. We lived there for a summer while I did an internship and Chip temped and waited to hear about a job. We got engaged there, and then drove Indy from Washington to New Haven and on to Amherst, MA, where Chip had gotten hired. Thus began the 90-mile-apart year and the 20,000 miles. The next summer, we packed up Indy again and drove to Montana to get married, tacking on a trip to Seattle to see friends.
After the wedding, we shoehorned all of our wedding gifts into the car and drove back cross-country to set up housekeeping in Amherst. Two years later, we dismantled that life, packed Indy up again, and drove back to Montana to prepare for our move overseas. And although everyone--and I do mean everyone--told us to sell the car before we left, we refused, storing it first at my very accommodating parents' house and then at Chip's very accommodating aunt and uncle's house. It was waiting for us, good as ever, when we moved back four years later.
So to say that I have a sentimental attachment to this car would be quite the understatement. We've had it longer than we've had our kids, our cat, even our marriage. And I just know that the goddamned insurance company is going to tell us that it's not worth fixing because, you know, it's so "old" and "worthless".
Not to me. Not to us.
I know it's only a car. I know I should just be down on my knees thanking multiple deities that Chip wasn't hurt. A few seconds difference and he would have been T-boned by the other driver (who was ticketed, by the way), straight into his door. It could have been so much worse. And yet...
I'm sad about the car and I'm bitter that we'll probably have to either go into more debt to replace the car or take a serious chance and buy something cheaper. There's no way we're going to be able to replace super-reliable Indy (with only 120,000 miles on it!) for what the insurance company will give us. And I know that by getting so sentimentally attached to something as impermanent as a car, I'm just asking for this kind of crap.
Meanwhile, if you wouldn't mind, spare a thought for Indy. Maybe he can make it out of one more scrape.
