Ode to a Honda Civic

During the Long Blog Blackout, one event occurred that can be seen as either momentous or no big deal, depending on whether you give a crap about cars. I confess that I do, and so when it came time to replace our 1997 Honda Civic with a newer Toyota Matrix, I was compelled to write this homage to the old trusty car. Read on below the pic.

It was inevitable, of course I knew it was inevitable. But just as humans have the ability to adapt to new situations, so they also often favor the routine, well-worn path. And in this case I’m talking about a path that was worn for nearly fourteen years: our 1997 Civic, bought at a time when we were kind of poor and in grad school and driving around in a shitty Hyundai Excel. That Civic seemed like pure luxury by comparison—I still remember feeling like it was a major step up even on the test drive. Now it’s fourteen years later and 185,000 miles further down the road, and it definitely doesn’t feel like luxury anymore. (Not that it ever really was: manual steering! manual transmission! manual windows and locks!)

A lot of people view cars with an entirely unromantic perspective: necessary transportation, gets you from here to there, annoying when they break down, unremarkable when they don't. Unfortunately I see cars as more integral to my life. In grad school it carried us on thousands of miles’ worth of trips back home for the holidays, most of them, it seems, conducted in horrifying snow or rainstorms legendary in scale. It was bought mere months after we got married, so it forms a sort of monument to the longevity of our relationship. It carried us into our new life when we graduated and moved back to the East Coast; we slept in it during that horrible drive east when there wasn’t anywhere to stay on the way. And then, a few years ago it acquired a roof rack, and we put our bikes on it and had all kinds of fantastic day trips and vacations. With the new car’s arrival it became almost purely a vehicle for the weekend, to escape the mundane life and to be free of weekday worries.

Of course, there is a new(ish) car to take over that role, so it's not as though I’m really losing something. In fact, objectively speaking I should be more excited, since the new(ish) car is so much younger than the old Civic. But for now, it’ll be those deadly adjectives New and Different—something my routine-loving personality will chafe at for a while. At least until it too becomes Old and Familiar. And someday I’ll write a fond homage to it, just like I'm doing now. Assuming that we still have the internet, of course.