“Ha ha ha, she hums like a bee”

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chZ4lAzC-0g&w=420&h=315]

This past weekend I scrapped my first car, the beloved 2001 midnight blue Chevy Malibu, a vehicle bestowed on me by my Dear Grandma Joan a year after I graduated from high school when I was still enjoying my pre-college-enrollment wanderlust. Joan’s eyes had been deteriorating for a while, and by then she had failed her eye exam altogether and so the Malibu went up for grabs. Still, I shouldn’t have been the one to inherit the car– I wasn’t the first grandchild in line for it, or the second. I come from a big Irish family, the rest of whom all still live somewhere between Seattle and Spokane, Washington, where Grandma Joanie and her husband Tony raised them up. But lucky for me, the rest of my cousins weren’t too impressed by Gram’s old wheels so up I picked with my two best girlfriends and headed out for the Pacific Northwest. Old Joan sold that car to us for $1, she did. Six weeks and six thousand miles later we were back in Brooklyn, wondering what all the fuss about cities was, thinking back to our days in the desert. Without hesitation we each cite this trip as the most formative experience of our lives thus far, and the car, being what enabled us to make it, is regarded high in our minds. Soon after our return, though, I was faced with a number of “adult” responsibilities. I got my very first on-the-books job, found my own place to live, and decided to apply to this crazy free school called Macky-something for the heck of it. Being back in New York, but living on my own for the first time, was exciting and incredibly stressful. I was mainly proud of how far I’d come from resignedly finishing high school to happily paying my own rent. But there one was one thing I never got the hang of: Alternate Side Parking. In that first year after our cross-country drive I racked up over $500 worth of parking tickets. Then, driving upstate one day, a cement truck passed in front of me, tiny pebbles shooting off the back haphazardly. Sure enough, one of them hit the front windshield and a little web appeared in the glass. A few weeks later my blinkers starting acting up and then my check engine light began turning on with the car. I kept telling myself that I was living a Mastercard commercial: new windshield, $350, new blinkers $50, new battery, $200, taking the beaten path, windows down, kicking up dirt in the old Chevy…priceless. But after a while, I could no longer convince myself that the jingle really applied. The truth is, I never really liked the cars that much, and having one in the city was a complete hassle. Deciding, finally, to ditch the Chev involved an interesting shift between its use value and exchange value. At first, the use value really did seem priceless and the exchange value not too shabby itself. We paid $1 when it could theoretically have been sold for around $1,500. But when we got home, the use value diminished tenfold. But what’s priceless divided by ten? Indeed, it was hard for me to come to terms with the fact that the car, which had been a home to us, was no longer “worth” maintaining. The exchange value too was diminishing, as I couldn’t afford the proper repairs. So, I made the “adult” decision and cut my losses.