My two cars have enough miles between them to circle the earth ten times at the equator. I prefer the older one, a Honda Civic that used to belong to my mother-in-law. Nothing about it stands outโnot its tan color, or its shape, or the small yellow-and-white parking decal from the College of Staten Island on its left rear window.
If you asked people to draw a car, my Honda is probably about what they would come up with. It has been through a lot. Last year, while driving absent-mindedly, I let it get overheated. I had not paid attention to the greenish stain on the pavement where I parked it.
All the coolant had leaked out through a hole in the radiator. I started smelling strange smells, steam and smoke came from under the hood, and I pulled over next to a Baptist church on Route 3 whose occupants immediately emerged to ask if they could help. He put in a used engine to replace it. The result is that the car looks different to me from the way it does to other people, just the way my face looks different in my bathroom mirror from the way it does in the security photos of me that the staff behind front desks take before I go into office buildings in Manhattan.
I mean that I do not think of my car as a junker. Recently, I was in a seven-car pileup on the Garden State Parkway. No one was badly hurt, though the multiple collisions totalled several cars. I got hit on the left rear bumper, which was smashed in, along with the tail-light. The plastic part of the bumper was hanging down. A state policeman who assessed the various damages came over to my Honda with his clipboard.
He walked around the car, taking it all in. Some people say that they hate to drive in the city and that driving in New Jersey is even worse. I think the state has decided that providing the kind of road signs that actually explain where you should go would do more harm than good, slowing traffic flow at crucial junctures.
