A Remembrance
My van went the way of all good machines yesterday, I donated it to charity because I didn’t want to go through the trouble of selling it…in reality I probably couldn’t have gone through with it. If I really had posted an ad I’m sure that I wouldn’t have ever called anyone back. So I called a donation service and it was gone 5 hours later.
I cried a bit, posted a lament to the ol’ blue M&M (the Vanagon’s name) on my facebook, thinking that I might get some nice remembrances of him from friends. What I got instead were a number of people telling me that it is better that he is gone because now I can grow up. I think he deserves better so I will share my eulogy here.
I got Blue M&M, my Vanagon, in 1997 after his predecessor died on the way to Fort Collins during a rugby trip. The predecessor, also a Vanagon, (I forget its name, the only outstanding characteristic it had was a sun roof the size of a backyard pool) wasn’t very good to me, it had spent a large amount of time broken down, and, since I was a poor college student, I had no good road trips with it. But I had fallen in love with driving the buses so I bought ol’ Blue the next month.
He immediately burrowed his way into my heart by having air-conditioning and an engine that could hold 70 mph on most roads. His name, however, was hard to decide on, my friends and I have always named our cars but required a strong event or characteristic to give the name meaning. We called it Ugly, Blue Machine, V II and the Mystery Machine for a while. But none of these seemed right, he always shrugged them off. In 1998 we finally hit on the name that stuck.
I was a member of a group in high school that was facetiously called the “Misogynists” for a while. The name was a joke to most people because the only thing against women we did was not to date. For most of us this was a favor to women but because of our separateness, it was assumed that we had something against women. In college I became the only remaining member of this group. Some had moved away and others fell to temptation and so I had this one remarkable thing that surrounded my otherwise unremarkable person.
The vanagon was brought into this by its talent of breaking down in certain situations. The first time I had a problem with it was just after I had given a girl who was a friend a ride home. The throw-out bearing broke, a minor thing but she tied it directly to the ride I had given her, as a result she called it the Misogyny Mobile. The name became slightly modified shortly thereafter by other friends as blue M&M’s had just been introduced so he became the Blue Misogyny Mobile, the Blue M&M for short.
From that time on he held his reputation as a confirmed woman hater, I had many road trips with the guy but only one made me want to punch his flat nose. I and my old group from high school all got on the same summer project with Campus Crusade in Myrtle Beach SC and I decided to drive out there rather than fly like so many other people did. To my delight there were two other people that wanted to share a ride out there from Colorado. So we all decided that I would pick them up and we would drive together. One of the ride sharers was a delightful young lady named Laurie. Needless to say M&M was not happy. He ran out of gas just outside of Colorado in Kansas. He destroyed his alternator outside of Kansas City. He threw three set of belts between the fixing of the alternator and the end of St. Louis. In the end he got us to SC, but he let us know his anger. At the end of the summer when it was just me and my brother going back he handled it like a champ.
Like all great friends he required investment, but he invested in me back. I had to fix him quite a bit in the 11 years we knew each other, but on his part he never broke down when I couldn’t afford to fix him. It was amazing really. I would be eating my third straight month of macaroni and he would tool along fine. But when I had saved up enough for a bit of a splurge he would drop a clutch or break an exhaust pipe. All in all he was great, if I kept the women from him he would keep me rolling wherever I needed to go.
Blue’s decline started last year. I got a car as a gift that got better gas mileage and so he was parked. We kept up the licenses and the insurance just in case I wanted a romp. I took him out here and there, but I could tell that he was feeling the neglect. His instrument panel started to break apart, and his age began to tell, the years weighing heavy on him. The telling blow came about a year and three months ago when some scoundrel threw a rock and destroyed a window in the rear. I couldn’t afford to repair it for the first time. I knew he understood but it hurt us both any way.
Then the final blow. Added to the ignominy of having to suffer without a full complement of protection of the elements, I further insulted him by driving my wife around as a treat on HER birthday. He had enough and gave up the ghost in the worst possible place: on the 408 in the fast lane with barely any shoulder. This was his final act of spite against the female species, and more particularly the one that had stolen me from my devotion to him. Blue M&M was able in a moment to ruin her birthday and strand us, without cell phones mind you, in the prickliest of situations.
My wife never had been reconciled to Blue and he never reconciled to her. I was stuck in the middle for two years of marriage but in the end he left me. I will not say that it was pure spite against my wife. Rather I know that it was his swan song. In one final effort, knowing he must lose me in the end to the greater pull of my wife, he ended his life in a way that typified and cemented his reputation for all time. He went out like he wanted to and that is a relief to me.
I have kept Blue’s corpse outside my house for a year, lacking the means and will to revive him after his glorious exit and lacking the will to let him go. Yesterday he was towed. He is gone now and all I have are memories and a few pictures to show my children when I tell stories of his exploits, which I will as I have promised him I would going up steep mountain passes. None of them will ever know him in the metal but they will know his noble spirit.
