Goodbye, my sweet Martha

Nostalgia prompted by selling a car, a reflection on life without one, and the past vehicles that were steady companions along the way.

I just lost more than 3000 pounds and you can too!

We’ve entered a new chapter having formally decamped from our “home.” It was sad and strange to be living in the place while dismantling all we had built inside it; however, it was still familiar. The hotel has helped the moving abroad part actually feel real, although I will note we can literally see our house out the window. Still, seeing our home completely empty and walking away from it for the last time was powerful, while this morning’s remote online notary appointment was (dare I say) energizing.

After weeks of flurried, harried activity, we have reached the stillness before the big leap tomorrow and are snuggled up together in a studio hotel suite comparing the shocking difference in temperature between Minnesota and Zuid-Holland — even in celsius, 9 beats -7.

Of all the hard parts, I didn’t expect selling the car to have any emotional attachment; however, if I’ve learned anything from the insane process of moving to another country in less than three months, it’s that you can’t predict the things that are going to send you reeling…

My first car was named George. He was an ugly brown boxy Toyota and I can still smell the interior (musty, with just a hint of fruit gum), but I loved him. I can’t speak for other countries, but learning to drive and the freedom of movement it brings is an incredibly powerful experience. The feeling of being on the open road, flying towards some new horizon and leaving everything in the rearview, in a cloud of dust.

I learned to drive from the football coach, who taught driver’s ed like a real high school class. This was last century, mind you, so I remember having mock steering wheels and something that resembled a Viewfinder for learning signs. My practical sessions were shared with Danny (close to my last name alphabetically). I still remember being closeted and not understanding why I always just wanted to stare at him…meanwhile, the football coach drove us 20 miles south and joked that we were going to pick up chicks.

George was there when I had my first car accident. I was heading home from dropping off a friend and performing “Barbie Girl” for myself when I rear-ended the car ahead of me. We were both merging onto the highway from a stoplight so it wasn’t a high-speed accident, but when the other driver waddled her pregnant belly from the car, I thought my life was over.

In my teenage years, my dad had a real bent on teaching me personal and fiscal responsibility so he made me come with him to the mechanic. The impact had buckled the front body and he had to wrench the hood open in our driveway. I mention this only because we couldn’t get it closed again and attempted to tie it down, only to have it fly up while he was driving and send the wipers through the windshield.

He paid for that part.

After George, I inherited Jenny who was, coincidentally, also a brown car—a shade I decided to call “fecal Sienna”—but she was lower to the ground and was a manual transmission, another of the skills my dad was bent on me gaining. I drove Jenny up and down, to and from college and eventually to Oklahoma where she served me faithfully, surviving on annual Christmas gifts from Mom and Dad to keep her running smoothly. Together, we drove from Oklahoma out to California - not once, but twice - where I eventually sold her to a father and daughter, continuing the cycle.

I didn’t have a car for several years after that, relying on rentals and loans while I was a nomad, on tour with a Broadway show. After my father’s diagnosis and several years of listening to the same musical numbers over and over, I moved home to spend some months with my parents. Dad was no longer driving so I was able to borrow his old car, an ice blue hybrid that I would eventually dub Molly.

After years of very old cars, Molly had technology from this century and driving her made me feel like I was Anakin Skywalker in a pod race. Her repairs were more expensive (thanks again Mom and Dad), but she lasted through the first years of our marriage which saw us moving from Minnesota to Maryland and onward to New Hampshire where we purchased our first home.

Owning a car is strange in the way that owning a house is - who owns whom? Yes, both are on-hand for your day-to-day, but they’re also the source of your biggest expenses. I read a “things Europeans find funny about the United States” listicle recently, and one of the notes was about how American houses look like they’re more for the car than the people. The big garage door facing the street that the cars fill, with a tiny box behind it where the people live.

It wasn’t until I was nearly forty that I finally bought a car properly. I’d paid my parents (in kind) for the cars along the way, but I had never received a vehicle from someone to whom I wasn’t related. We’ve all seen the cliche of car salespeople and been given some sort of advice on how to get the best deal and I remember wishing Dad were still alive so I could have asked him the millions of questions that filled my overly worrisome mind. Without him, I did the best I could but the moment I sat behind the wheel, I turned to the salesman and said, “Well shit, I guess that’s that.”

Martha is a 2015 Subaru Crosstrek, proudly confirming me as doubly homosexual. After years of using those weird cassette tape to iPod converters, Martha has bluetooth. After a lifetime of swinging my arm over the seat and craning my neck in a direction it is not biologically meant to go, Martha has a backup camera. She has seats that fold down, leaving plenty of room for all of the items we donated to various charitable organizations. My being an introverted shut-in who worked from home meant Martha spent long stretches of time in our detached garage, punctuated by my weekly trips to Pilates, out for brunch with my niblings, or to make sure the battery was still capable of turning over (there are months of subzero temperatures in Minnesota).

Today, after we signed away the house, I took Martha for one last ride out to the dealership where we’ve taken her for the past few years since she made the trip from New Hampshire. We’ve had ups and downs, but she has been a steady companion. While I won’t miss the existential dread that accompanies having an incredibly expensive, fragile, and powerful machine that sits outdoors, I will miss that feeling of sliding behind the wheel at a moment’s notice.

At the dealership, they told me Martha was light on features (she was out of ear-shot) but praised her low mileage (see previous shut-in comment). A few signatures later, she was no longer mine and I was riding in the backseat of a Lyft, on the way to our hotel across the street from the house we used to own…where I promptly walked inside and began frantically checking my pockets for the car keys.

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