Tomorrow morning, the junkman will come and pick up my old ’93 Toyota Corolla, which I have owned since July, 1997. When I bought the car, we were still living in the center of Concord, Massachusetts, and I was still working in my first church job, as the Director of Religious Education at First Parish in Watertown. The car has driven me to work at every church I have served, and it has driven me home to apartments in Newton, Concord, Oakland, Geneva, Illinois, and now New Bedford. We drove from Massachusetts to Oakland in that car, stopping at Havusupai Canyon and Mono Lake on the way. And after a year there we drove the car back, stopping along the way to spend a year in Geneva, Illinois. I bought it with 45,000 miles on it, and now it has 177,000 miles one it. That car has been one of the most constant things in my life over the past decade. But now the brake lines are so corroded the mechanic said I can’t trust them ($1,500 to repair), and the timing belt is due to be replaced ($650), and the power steering pump sounds like it’s going (at least $500), and the rear struts are shot. And Carol’s mom wants to get rid of her ’93 Toyota Camry, for well below market value, and with less than half the mileage of my old car. The poet Robert Graves wrote that “technology produces millions of identical and spiritually dead objects which as a rule take far longer to humanize than their expected length of service; whereas unmechanized craft exercised by individuals or closely knit groups produce objects with elements of life in them.” Unfortunately, I can’t afford to spend $3,000 on repairs in the hopes that my old car will become more humanized in a few more years; I can’t afford sentiment; the junkie will come tomorrow maybe leaving behind a few rusty memories.

Update: This morning (March 20), we got a call from someone we met through an environmental group, and he wanted the car so he could fix it up for one of his teenaged kids. He and his daughter just came and picked it up, and I called off the junkman.