The Advantages of Having an Old Car in the Big City

yesterday was the second day in a row that some jackass tried to inch his way in front of me while we were both waiting to make left turns.  i was at the head of a left-turn only lane, trying to turn onto a one-way side street from a 4-lane thoroughfare.  the offenders came from my right and sat in the middle of the intersection.  both guys kept moving forward, trying to block me from making the turn.  um, hello.  ever hear of a thing called "right of way"?

interestingly, both drivers were in SUVs, while i drove my teeny, little (but cute!) import.  did they think i’d be intimidated by size?  please.  i’ll admit though, that for a moment i wished i was in my old car–an ‘87 Honda Accord.  hatchback.

this thing was so banged up that if you opened the passenger door more than a few inches, it made a wrenching, metal-scraping-against-metal sound.  the rear bumper was nonexistent, having been torn off by an SUV pulling out of a parking spot before i finished driving past.  what killed me is that all of the body damage was inflicted by other drivers.  it really brought home what my dad used to say:  "it isn’t you i’m worried about.  it’s the other drivers."

i’ll tell you what though, it handled way better than my mom’s joke-of-a-Benz 190.  and after 17 years, the tape player still worked.  so what if the front and rear plates didn’t match?  (the design, not the numbers.)  this was the Millennium Falcon of Honda Accords.  it even passed its last emissions test.  let’s face it.  at the end of the world, all that’ll be left are cockroaches, Keith Richards, and Honda Accords.

so you see, if i had my old car, there’s no way in hell that those guys would’ve tried what they did.  no one wants to mess up their nice car smashing into a junky one, and no one wants a junky one smashing into their nice car; because a nice car can so easily become junky, but a junky car’s got nothing to lose.  like say, a rear bumper.