Car

As Executor and Trustee, I took possession of my father's car after his death in 2011. It was a 2000 Infiniti I30 with only about 50,000 miles on it, not bad for being eleven years old. It enjoyed a much more active life once I got a hold of it, especially on those first-year late-night dates with Sunya. Repurposed a few downtown alleys and suburban parking lots, we did.

S helps me take it home from Dad's

For a while it became her car for reasons it's not my place to describe, and after that her daughter borrowed it from me. She got her driver's license and finished her last year of high school with it, and just kept it as "her" car because I knew that for her sake, and for the family's in general, that was the best arrangement. I took it back once in a while, but only for maters of urgency.

Now she's in her second year of college and working two jobs. One of those is at a shopping center where weekend before last she innocently had it parked exactly where another car needed to go after its driver completely lost control at an adjacent business, chanced upon a path between two young redwood trees, and crashed through the bushes down into the next lot.

Shit white cars do

After some time passed deciphering confused texts and calming youthful nerves, I contacted the other party's insurance company and found that the car rental company they usually work with had one office that was still open on a Saturday afternoon, and it was the closest office too. So we played musical cars -- daughter got S's car, S got the truck, and I got the rental -- and I had my dad's car towed to my house.

It sat for a week. Neighbors wondered what happened. A small boy curiously picked at it for damage souvenirs. I removed blankets and articles of clothing and papers and books and other objects of a volume only a teenaged girl could accumulate in one vehicle. Finally the insurance adjuster came around and spent a couple hours combing over it. He looked at every little thing, determined its probable resale value before the accident, estimated the repair costs, and correctly predicted that it would be declared a total loss. Apropos of nothing, he was the brother of a co-worker I knew twenty years ago. Finally there was nothing left but for me to call their towing company and have it removed.

When tow day came, a mixture of feelings arose in me. I wanted to stay home to see it go away. I wanted to come home from work and find it gone. It was the single largest tangible asset my father had left behind, and hints of a weepy sentimentalism kept trying to crawl up through the cracks. In the end, though, I came back from work last Friday to find it gone, and I shed no tears, just took a picture of the spot where it had been and went about my evening. (And what an evening: West End Wonderland at Blackbird.)

It didn't take long to see the blessing in it. I am loaded down by a lot of things and need simplification, and it seems the Universe gave me a little simplification by taking my father's car away in the easiest way possible. I get to exchange it for a little more money than I thought it was worth, and hopefully buy a reasonably good little Honda or something for various kids to use. No emotional baggage, just taking care of biz.