My husband and I make it a practice to name our cars. It seems the polite thing to do. And we’ve always believed that by treating our cars well, both mechanically and in … shall we say … more ineffable ways, they will return the favor.

 

There was valiant Toad Williams, our very first car, a silver Toyota Corolla that once drove 150 miles on empty. This same car drove for thousands of miles on only two cylinders. Everyone but the driver had to get out and walk when we went up steep hills, but bizarrely, this only seemed wrong in retrospect. This car was so considerate, it waited to have its brakes go out until I was coasting into our mechanic’s service station at 0.025 mph to get some gas.

 

Then there was The Dragon (above), a ’53 Chevy pickup truck that we used while building our home here in Redding. In fact, it served as shelter as well, since we started the project thinking that it would be fun (!) to camp in a mildewed green army tent while building the house. Dragon was missing the passenger’s side window glass, but all we had to do was drape a towel over the opening, huddle together, and presto! Instant dining room! Dragon not only hauled all our belongings from Sacramento to here (including garbage bags filled with grass clippings that our brother-in-law felt sure would come in handy), he possessed such a simple engine that even I could occasionally figure out why it would suddenly die in the middle of Highway 299.

 

 

Come to think of it, though, our strategy did not work so well with a cranky Datsun sedan we named Tallulah. The engine had been rebuilt and in the process, some poltergeist of an electrical problem had been introduced, never to be identified during the time that we owned the car. Eventually, its name changed from Tallulah to Piece of [Vulgar Word for Excrement.] Which, now that I think about it, did seem to make matters worse.

 

But then there was Oscar, the Ford Taurus Stationwagon that my dad bequeathed to us shortly before he died, AKA “The Bouge-mobile” and “Living Room on Wheels.” Oscar lived out my dad’s fantasy of tooling around on unmarked roads in dusty, godforsaken lands. Whenever my father had tried to pull such shenanigans with my mother in the car, she would grip the dashboard so hard we were all afraid she was going break off big chunks of it, while she managed to purse her lips so tight in disapproval a mini black hole might have actually gotten started in her mouth if my father hadn’t gotten us back on pavement just in the nick of time.

 

But the best car story of all may belong to our 1991 Honda Civic hatchback, Bettina. Shortly after we purchased Bettina, I decided to go for a bike ride on the river trail. So I put the bike rack on the back of the car and loaded on my bike; then I started down the driveway. I hadn’t gone more than two feet when the passenger’s seat belt icon started flashing and making an annoying beeping noise. I took my purse off the seat, thinking that this might help, but it didn’t. I tried fastening the seatbelt on the passenger’s seat and restarting the car. No dice. Gritting my teeth and doing my best to ignore the now extremely annoying beeping noise, I continued on. Then I thought: Maybe some wires were crossed—the hatchback and the seatbelt—and I hadn’t fully secured the hatchback before I put the bike rack on. But when I stopped and checked everything out, I found that, although the hatchback was firmly latched, I had merely hooked the top of the bike rack to the hatchback and neglected to fasten it to the bumper. My bike would have gone flying off the car the first time I took a hard turn. So I made sure that everything was secure before climbing back into the car and starting up again, resigned to more incessant beeping. But it had stopped. Completely.