Around the World 3 1/2 Times

I've put 86,323 miles on my car. Many of them while completely sober.

For those geography types, that's almost three and a half times around the equator.

My car doesn't get very much credit, especially from me. She's done her job, though, and hasn't once complained. Other people give their cars creative names like Crayola, Blue Bomb, or Hercules. Not my Nissan. If anything, she should just be called Rodney Dangerfield; she gets no respect. (And no, that is not her new name.)

I get a kick out of how people describe her. I've gotten parking tickets that say everything from yellow to orange to gold. For the record, she's Brushed Pewter, thank you very much.

I haven't liked my car very much lately. She's showing her age. There are so many dings and dents and chips all over her it makes me cringe just to look at her. Sometimes it seemed like that stripper across the street that you know used to be really hot, but now...it just makes you sad to see.

That was until today. She got washed today. Not one of those drive-through buy-five-gallons-and-get-a-free-wash gas station jobs, but the real thing. Vacuum cleaners, mat shampooers, and foreigners with blue rags and bottles of glass cleaner. She's beautiful. She still has the dings and dents, but without all the dirt and tar all over her it makes it easy to see what all she's been through for me.

I still remember the first time I drove my car. It was the night of my high school graduation. I still remember the look on my girlfriend's face when she had to ride in the back because my big brother jumped in the front seat first. What can I say, he called shotgun. She's also the reason I chuckle a little bit when someone sits in that certain spot on the backseat. Don't even try to look, you can't see it. But I know where it is, and it makes me smile inside.

It took me several years to finally get the last bit of crusty dried vomit out of the dashboard after almost driving home from the Library in Lubbock. I never got out of the parking lot, thank God. (editor's note: the Library is a bar, not a big building with books.)

There's a little ding on the left side of the front bumper from driving home on Sept. 1, 2001. It was opening day for dove season in Texas, and I was driving back to Dallas for the weekend. I killed the first dove that year, but I didn't think there was enough left of the bird to keep...I was doing about 85.

She took me from Dallas, to Lubbock, to Atlanta, to Hyde Park, and now to Boston. The day she was registered in Massachusetts was a sad day. I thought I heard a sniffle as I took off the Texas licence plate, then I saw a tear drop as I put on the Mass plates. As I found out the next morning, it wasn't a tear after all. It was transmission fluid. But I know she ached just the same.

Maybe I'll sell her one day, but it'll be hard to do. I might even shed a few drops of transmission fluid.