The Little Ford

Now that I’m a grownup, I drive a sober Swedish car – a Saab 900 from 1996, with a stick shift and a hatchback and a large pile of cracker crumbs in the backseat. It’s nimble, it gets good gas mileage, it has a six CD changer. What more could a girl want?

More. I want charm. I want magic. I want my heart to sing when I sidle up to my car in the parking lot.

And once upon a time, and really for a rather long time, 17 years to be precise, I had such a car. A little Ford Fiesta. It lived on the streets of NYC and looked like hell as a result. But it went like stink all day long, got amazing gas mileage, and was surprisingly capacious for a small car.

And it had charm. It didn’t have air-conditioning, but it did have those little tilting vent windows. It had a dent on the nose where I ran (gently) into the back of an (empty) school bus in stop-and-go traffic on the Long Island Expressway when I leaned over to get my Tab. Its gas gauge was idiosyncratically pessimistic – it had about a ¼ tank left when the gauge read empty – and all too easily one could be lulled into a false sense of security and then, oops, run out of gas on the FDR Drive. To lock the door, you had to open the handle while pushing down the lock button – so I developed a second nature method of opening the (driver’s side) door with my right hand while pushing the button down with my left elbow.

And the car was magic. I’ve written about it once before, about the time the muffler fell off. Another time, W. and I were driving leisurely through rural Pennsylvania, near the Water Gap, on a lovely Sunday afternoon, before cell phones were ubiquitous. He was driving, and noticed something awry, and determined that the car was burning up a wheel bearing (he knows these things). He pulled off the road near someone’s barn and we scratched our heads as to what to do next. With that, the barn doors opened and a guy came out. “Can I help you?” “Well, we’ve blown a wheel bearing.” “Come with me, and bring the jack.” With that, the guy takes off across the road and into a field behind another barn. There in the field: another white Ford Fiesta, junked, abandoned, rusting. They jacked up the parts car, pulled off the wheel bearing, and trotted back to where my little Ford was waiting. Transplant in place, $20 to our savior, we went on our way, marveling at our luck, and at the magic of the little car.

And possibly the best thing about the little car? When it was finally time to part with it, its floorboards were rotting out and driving through a puddle on the Cross Island Expressway caused the car to sputter to a halt, meaning that we made that Thanksgiving traffic jam, I’m sorry to say. But, through the miracles of the internet, we found some crazy people in New Hampshire who were racing Ford Fiestas, and they came to NY and paid me $400 for the little car, $400 so it could go off to another life as a racing car. What a way to go, eh? So much better than the ignominious junkyard that most cars go to when they die. A race car. My little Ford.

Someday, sooner than later, the Saab is going to go. Its clutch is weak, the display for the climate control (but not the control itself) is shot, and it really needs new tires. And I’m at a loss as to what could possibly replace it, especially since the poor Saab has never quite wormed its way into my heart the way the little Ford did.

You may well ask why I’m writing a paean to a Ford Fiesta – a car that’s not been available in the US since, oh, 1980. Well, MotherGooseMouse had a post today about her dear, departed Pacifica – and it turned out that her post was in response to a blog blast by the Parent Bloggers Network announcing Car Blabber at Ask Patty – and one thing led to another. Somehow, I don’t think this is what they’re looking for, but it’s what came to mind. I did rather like that Ford.