New Car - Old Car Sorrow

This week, after a final beaurocratic roadblock (I faied inspection due to engine light) I was forced, finally, to trade in my trusty, loyal, hardworking Ford Focus stationwagon and buy another car. This should have been a happy occasion but I couldn't help but feel sad at trading in my old Ford, my trusty friend of so many years 16! Together through the decade following retirement, my old Ford and i traveled the highways and byways of rural South Jersey discovering all sorts of fascinating places and creating myriad new threads of interest, as well as inspring many voluteer placements, all of which, eventually I had to abandon due to my car's aging and my own knees and back.

Today, while walking the dog, a picture arose in my memory of a small, shabby, turquoise camper turned into a home, that my old Ford and I passed otne winter evening on our way home from the lower reaches of the Maurice River - oyster territory. The little trailer had a string of old fashioned big bulb Christmas lights in the tiny window and a small lit up tree. It spoke of warmth and the human desire to join in with our fellow humans to celebrate another year of survival, another winter when we had a roof over our heads and warmth, however humble. That was probably 20 years ago that my old Ford and I passed that humble but warm little home on the roadside, yet I think of it often.

I already miss my old car and the adventures we shared. I don't feel absurd for this affection or alone in experiencing it because I read once in a novel set in a Native American Reservation out west, how a gorup of fellows named their car and both treated it and felt about it as though it were like their old horses. I am sure I am not alone in giving human affection and respect to what is popularly known as an inanimate object. People have always held onto lucky objects, and companionable coffee cups, lucky caps and old uniforms from military service. These objects come to incorporate and resonate with our experiences which we shared with them.

I know people have felt that way about their old typewriters, their old laptops, lucky backpacks and so on. It makes me sad to think of my car being stripped for her parts and then junked. But like the biblical character, if we look back, we turn to salt - salty tears. We must all learn to pick up and move on faces turned resolutely to the next step, the next place, not the one we have left.

This is the time of yeara that I loved most to travel the old roads. I would pick a road and simply follow it until it ended, often at magical places like Greenwich, or Bivalve. Speaking of Bivalve, and the turquoise trailer home, I am reminded of other small, humble shacks that I often saw off roadsides and beside creeks. It made me think of the migrant oyster shuckers from down South who came up to work in the oyster industry before it was wiped out by the bacteria carried in the bilge water of ships coming home from Asia during the Korean War. It was a multi-million dollar industry with hundreds of boxcars carrying iced oysters as well as canned, shucked oysters, to the markets of New York City and Philadelphia. My own last taste of an oyster was at my grandmother's house in Philadelphia bout 65 years ago when even relatively poor people could afford them. New York City polluted ints own rich oyster beds, and then New Jersey lost ours. Stray individuals in those migrant farm worker convoys of pickers found a way to survive off the creeks and agricultural harvest seasons in South Jersey and stayed. Bivalve, Shell Pile, Port Norris and other small towns in the area have these descendants as residents.

It makes me wonder about the personal history of the individual in the little turquoise traer/home, how that person lives, the family history that brought him or her to that shady grove. There was no car nearby, so how did that person manage? How did that resident grocery shop, for example? But maybe he or she had relatives nearby who came to help. Maybe it was another person, like myself, washed up on the shores of old age.

Well, new car or not, I won't be having those adventures anyore becasuse of my dwindling eyesight, which, even supported by all the new on board aids like the gps and back-up camera, doesn't permit of such potentially dangerous recklessness as driving off into the great unknown, even with a new and trusworthy car. But you still can - so Happy Trails!

Jo Ann (as stated before - skip comments and if you wish to communicate e-mail me at wrightj45@yahoo.com - comments gets regularly hacked by porno trolls)