There was the parts cab, an early 80’s mid-sized Ford LTD. It will be leaving tomorrow. I owned two cabs like it, sequentially, and this one had provided parts for both. They were excellent taxis, with durable V-6’s, and not hard to maintain. Ford doesn’t make them anymore.
The second car was my third cab, an ’84 Crown Victoria. After my two mid-sized cabs, I decided to try the bigger, more luxurious Ford. It was, indeed a pleasure to drive. It was attractive and comfortable, but the 5-liter V8 had suffered at the hands of Yellow Cab’s underpaid, under-motivated mechanics before I acquired it, resulting in a foreshortened life. I had hoped to replace the engine, but never found an affordable one, so it remained enshrined and immobile until day before yesterday.
Gone too is Hawkeye’s old Dodge van that he had parked years ago when he was still my roommate. It could have been rehabilitated perhaps, but it had a large fuel-hungry V8. Hawkeye said I could have it, but I didn’t have the title. It served as a storage space for old computers, mostly. When I cleaned it out before the tow, though, I discovered some audio tapes, on 12-inch studio-sized reels, that I didn’t know were there. They were Hawkeye’s. I thought he had taken all his tapes. I lost contact with him some time ago. Now I need to find a large reel-to-reel machine to try to convert them to CD’s, becuase I’m sure there is some
excellent and probably rare material on those tapes.
I will surely miss my imperfect sculptures in steel; my over-sized lawn ornaments. Inevitably I will need a part that one of them could have provided. But more than that, I am one who prefers not to give in to the dull aesthetics of over-organized mundane neatness. Not everything in my environment needs to be immediately useful, nor even beautiful in the conventional sense. There is something rather soothing and philosophically satisfying about an old car that is no longer expected to do anything, except to
BE.