A Sad Day for the Mejia Household

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while – unfortunately, work has been getting in the way.

I sold my 2003 Dodge Neon on July 25^th, 2011. Although most would consider her a crappy car, I had a special love for Nelly. I bought her new, and she carried me from Washington to Los Angeles to Davis and finally to San Francisco. She safely transported me on a 12 hour drive through a crazy blizzard in Tahoe. She drove me (ok, I drive her, but you get the point) to work every day for 8 years and never had a major breakdown. She’d been with me through love, pain, friendship, anger, despair, change, and a million other life events. She was even famous amongst a large swath of my friend circle (although there was probably a lot of tongue-in-cheek, I was amazed at the number of people who were a bit sad about the car selling).

I’m not sure if it’s like this in other countries, but cars are such a huge part of the American being. It starts when you get your first bicycle as a kid – the bike represents your first bit of freedom from your family, your first taste of life that is out beyond your front yard. As you hit your teens and get your driver’s license, you borrow the car and venture even further away. In college…well, my friends and I did a lot of stupid shit in cars, but the car was still a central figure in many of our most cherished stories – my buddy Chris driving 15 people around in his Chevy pick-up, rally crashing my Cherokee into a sign post, my roomie Ben driving us to the Jack-in-the-Box one block from our house at 2AM, etc.

Basically, some of the best (or at least most memorable) events of my life were at a minimum accompanied by cars if not defined by them. And my Neon was no exception.

Now, some would say maybe I’m blowing the owning of a $10,000 car out of proportion. I don’t think it’s necessarily about the car itself but more about what I’ve been through with that car – all the good and bad history of my life that Nelly accompanied me on. I feel a sense of moving on into another portion of my life. All in all, this is a good thing, but if you don’t feel at least a bit sad about moving on, maybe you didn’t get everything you should have from that chapter of your life.

So farewell Nelly. I really will miss you. I hope you help your next owner gets as much out of their life accompanied by you as I did. Excuse me; I have to go change the headlight bulb in my “new” car.

KM