The Beetle and I go way back. I’m unapologetically a child of the sixties and I’ve always loved Volkswagen Beetles. My second car was a used Beetle, one of the older kind before they were discontinued. I had to sell it to pay for seminary. Since things tend to happen in cycles, I was teaching in seminary when we could finally afford car payments and we bought one of the New Beetles before they discontinued them. That was back in 2003. I mentioned in a previous post that I had to trade in a twenty-year old car for a new one. That was the Beetle. Cleaning it out was an exercise in history. And it brought a few tears. We’d only put 113,000 miles on that car—it had electronics issues that kept it in the shop a lot—but it was more the years than the distance. There were memories. It wasn’t unlike having your dog die.
I remember buying the Beetle on Blue Mound Road. This was back in Wisconsin. Waiting for it to arrive (only a matter of days instead of months). Driving a stick-shift again. It was basic driving. Each little artifact I pulled out from under the seat, or tucked away in the trunk, triggered another memory. A tear or two escaped, I confess. We were unaware that just a couple short years after buying it that Nashotah House would turn savage and we would have to drive the Beetle halfway across the country to find work. Registering a car in New Jersey is a surreal experience. I used it for commuting to Gorgias Press until that ended, then commuting to Rutgers and Montclair State. Then came the long, long years of commuting by bus to New York when the Beetle sat mostly neglected in the driveway. All those trips up to Binghamton, then Ithaca.
The move to Pennsylvania involved yet more paperwork, since cars are more complicated than any other commodity. The Beetle became our short-trip car. I love shifting gears manually. Feeling a sense, however illusory, of control. Of longevity. We kept the car for two full decades, making memories along the way. It was alas, aging. At twenty it was like fifty in dog years and the check engine light was on again although it just passed inspection. It felt wrong pulling all the accoutrements out, getting ready to hand an old friend over to a stranger’s care. We’d been the car’s only owners in three states. Through four presidential administrations. There was a lot of personal history there. It’s the end of an era. Goodbye, old friend.