Hey, me too!
Mine used to belong to my great-uncle. That’s the only one of my great-uncles to die of old age. I mean, when you die at 89 with no serious conditions other than being bloody old, that’s “dying of old age”, right? He’d had the car for 12 years but the poor thing had spent the last 6 parked on the street.
Since great-uncle’s wife had died just three days before (the cementery even put her internment “on hold” so they’d be interred at the same time), my uncle had to figure out what to do with everything with not just one, but two wills. OK, so this goes here… this goes there… and the car goes to charity.
Only, none of the charities in town wanted it.
While uncle was in this conundrum, I got a summer job 10mi from town; Dad thought of great-uncle’s car and convinced uncle to give it to me (hey, college students are poor, giving one the means to go to work counts as charity!). Dad paid the dues for the transfer.
I did say it had been parked, unmoving, in the street, in a town where it rains a lot and even sometimes snows, for six years, didn’t I?
The poor car didn’t look bad and it managed to move under its own power so long as you didn’t go beyond 2nd gear, but when we took it to the mechanic he called up friends to look at it. I used to park it at the top of a hill so it would be easier to start.
One day, I start it, get to the bottom of the hill, have to stop to let some people pass and then the car wouldn’t start again. OK, I have a request: if someone is trying to start a car and the car is making WR-WRRR-WZZZZZH! noises, do not blow your goddamn horn, it doesn’t help! A guy (gypsy, which isn’t really relevant but I remember it) helped me shove it to an empty lot nearby, raised the hood and dove in. He came up for air with a funny look on his face and said “how did you start it?” “I was parked up there” “Ah”. Turns out there is a long, thin lever that goes from the gas pedal to the carburetor or thereabouts and it had broken. OK. No cellphones back then. Since that lot was unused, I figured I’d walk the 2mi to the hospital where Dad worked, which was on the same route I had to take, and beg a lift. Before I got there, though, I was hailed by a coworker who had come looking for me because it wasn’t like me to be late and they were afraid my car would have blown up or whatever (there was another coworker who was as much as 6 hours late and nobody twitched).
About two weeks after getting the car back, a tire blew just as I was turning to enter the factory. I realized I couldn’t really stop it, just lifted my feet from the pedals and managed to turn it round, so instead of hitting a concrete pillar head-on I just scraped the side against it. I was fine (although pretty scared of driving for a while) but the bill ate my micro-salary of two months. I’ll be eternally grateful to the maintenance guy who, seeing how shaken I was, told me that I had done the right thing and all those morons saying “what, don’t you know about brakes” should be cordially invited to jump into the river in January.
That car was later inherited by my brother, who could fill a few volumes about The Travails Of Crazy Wolf And His Not-So-White Steed. It finally got retired when Spain moved to lead-less gas.
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