R.I.P Eleanor

So I survived the darling month of May, despite the distress always attendant upon the absence of my sweetheart, who was again off hobnobbing with the kangaroos and the koalas. And on the twentieth of June she was engaged in a typical errand of mercy—taking Zannah to the Salt Lake International Airport, if I remember aright—when, negotiating the perennial construction in those precincts, she ran afoul of an array of Jersey barriers, destroying our beloved Eleanor’s passenger-side wheels and tires.

Eleanor, after the Resurrection

Hello, State Farm! Help, towing company and repair outfit! You can’t be serious! Repairs can’t be that expensive! What do you mean, TOTALLED? She has only a quarter-million miles on her, and she’s only eighteen years old! Barely an adult vehicle! And she’s been so faithful, through all that time and all our transcontinental hegiras! Never given us the proverbial lick of trouble! You can’t mean she’s only worth fifty bucks to the bone-yard! What a disaster!

As they were coming to drag her off to the knacker’s yard, a neighbor happened by and offered us $300 for her, so that he could fix her up for one of his teenagers. We jumped at the opportunity. And now, when I walk around the neighborhood, I smile wistfully and greet our old Eleanor, now mercifully restored and presumably otherwise named, with a tear of gratitude that she didn’t go for scrap, after all. This is how she looks in the neighbor’s driveway. Ron, through whose beneficent intervention we obtained her in 2003, when we arrived as poster-children for clinical depression, frequently mentions the fancy new wheels with which her new proprietor fitted her. You tell me: does she look totalled to you?

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