90 Grand

The odometer on the trusty Saturn crossed 90,000 recently. Bought her on June 12, 1999. Within a couple months we were en route to Branson, Missouri with the new family, having crossed our 1-year anniversary in March. A wide-load trailer was hauling half of a house down the interstate through St. Louis, and a stray shingle flew loose to scratch her windshield with a bang. That scratch still sits there, a youthful scar carried into maturity. Since then she's had a good part of her engine rebuilt. She's seen me leave the actuarial department for eight years, and be brought back. Been sideswiped and had two doors replaced. Drove Dad to a chemo treatment, and us to his funeral. Carried me on 3,000 round trips to the office or so. Shrugs off dust at the next good rainfall. Hosted only a handful of rear-seat passengers, mostly adorable nieces born after the day I bought her... but still enough to justify staying a four-door sedan man. The sun visor sags from years of gravity, and unexplainable random patterns of slits cross the roof, as if wrinkles gathering around her eyes. She's seen me cycle up to and down from the apex of church life, up to and down from the leadership of a department. Her tires are original, the next part to be replaced. That is, if the relationship should continue? "I love my little car." Said it numerous times when squeezing her into cramped parking spots abandoned by others. Yet she is just an object, albeit one I've spent the equivalent of 80 straight days inside. I gazed through the kitchen window, overlooking her sitting in the only parking lot she's known to be home all her life, stout even in the shadow of the F-150 in the adjacent spot and the thousands of vehicles that have towered over her. If the good Lord sees a turning point for me to a new phase of life within a few years, I figured I'd like her to be by my side until then. She's outlived the company that made her. I think she'd like to see me outlive the company that made me. And she'll look darn good gripping the road in new shoes until she hits 120,000.