Goodbye to a good car

What is it about our relationships with cars?

We get emotionally attached. We thank them for being good ... like that cold winter morning start. We curse them for being bad ... like that cold winter morning grind that wears the battery down to nothing.

Sometimes we give them names: Tex, Donny, Vinnie.

We clean them, we bathe them, we feed them with gas.

And we mourn their passing, which I'm doing for the 2002 Mazda 626 that was sent to scrap last week.

It's not like this car had a quirky personality that made it so lovable. I never named it. It was just "the Mazda" -- a solid, fairly pedestrian four-door means of transportation.

It's the car's history -- particularly where it took my children -- that made it lovable.

It was the car in 2008 that took my daughter Elizabeth safely to Cincinnati for a three-month hospital affiliation as part of her physical therapy degree.

It was the car in 2009 that took my son David (see photo) and his two friends on an extended cross-country journey. It was part pack mule, part camper and part dining room in addition to being the wheels that got them from here to there to everywhere.

I've always had the feeling that our cars are self aware.

How else can you explain why they do what they do when they do it?

Something happens with them at the most inconvenient time, like it's payback for something we did to them or something we said about them or something we're thinking about them.

It's what happened with the Mazda.

David had been using the car while he lived in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston. And he'd been accepted into graduate school at Columbia University in New York City.

He doesn't have a need for a car there. I didn't have a need for the car, so the question was how to get it back to New Hampshire to be sold.

Then the transmission gave out about a month before David left for New York. The repair was going to be too costly for me to recover in a sale on top of what I still owed on the car.

The Mazda made the decision about its future.

I went into Jamaica Plain to make arrangements to have it scrapped. David cleaned it out, found a few dollars worth of change: penny, nickel, dime and quarter memories of a trip among three amigos.

And I touched the hood and said, "Thanks."

It didn't have the personality of other cars I've had -- Tex the Midnight Rambler, Donny Dart or even Vinnie Volvo.

But any car that kept my children safe for as many miles as they rode in it is a good car in my book.