Harold Pinter and other cars we've owned

The death of a car is a passing. Our first car wasn’t even our car, but we were lent a blue AMC Matador for our honeymoon, and since we were playing at being married we pretended it was ours, pretended the camp in the woods on Willsboro Bay near Lake Champlain was ours, pretended the rowboat and the chilly damp rooms of the cabin and the kitchenware and the ashtrays and the smoke up the chimney were ours. The first car that was ours we nicknamed Harold Pinter, Harold Pinter the Pinto, and like a first dog his passing took the longest from which to recover. We sang many songs happily together in that car, we solved problems in it, perhaps we strapped our first baby into a car seat on its back cushions. Later cars we seemed glad to be rid of, a used and useless big Ford of some forgotten model, a white Dodge Neon that was new and then very soon old. When the green 1998 Civic died today, Ben said, "I rode in that car since I was 10 years old," and back then our boys were sprouting stalks with legs too long already for the back seat, their heads soon to be too high, too big, for a little Honda. It was time to say goodbye to the dead car, and drive it to the parts guy and collect $300 for its unbroken bits of memory.