Well, I finally did it today. I put the Toyota down. We made the trek to Crazy Otto's Junk Yard to deposit the dying remains of a dear friend. I took James Sonpon with me for moral support. He helped the Toyota to personify and verbalize what it was thinking. James said, "Let me go peacefully!" "Let me rest in peace," he said. Some how I think James was channeling the Toyota. Incredible, don't you think?
The Toyota definitely followed the Allred's rule of car purchasing. Cars have to have at least 100,000 miles on it or they are not Allred worthy. They have to have been made in a decade previous to the one we are currently living in. Most recently that rule has been amended to "they have to have been manufactured in any previous millennia." There was one rule we had to drop from Allred's law. That was that it had to cost less then my previous computer purchase. The problem with that rule was that computers had gotten so cheap. Oh, well!
Of course, I bought the car on eBay sight unseen for $800 in March of 2005. I only put about 50,000 miles on this car. That works out to be 1.6 cents per mile. I think that comes out to $17 per month of driving pleasure. OK, so there wasn't that much driving pleasure in being caught dead in that car. My kids hated being seen in it and my wife refused to drive it. She said that it was that she didn't know how to drive a manual transmission but I know better.
Somehow I can't find a picture that I took of the car. I wonder if there is any correlation.
I was a little disappointed that it didn't go longer. I guess I shouldn't have driven it so hard. Perhaps my kids drove it hard too.
I remember when the car started going downhill. I was going to work one Sunday morning a year ago November. I had to work overtime . I was pushing it up to 80 miles per hour on Route 32 when it lost power and the motor started running roughly. I took it to get tuned and the mechanic told me that the third cylinder had lost compression. There was nothing he could do. I decided then and there I would drive every last mile I could squeeze out of it. I reasoned, "three out of four cyclinders isn't that bad."
I bought my last Tercel from Art Powell, my landlord mentor, also for the same amount, $800. I met Art when I worked for Northrop Grumman in Pico Rivera. We were coworkers in the Materials and Processes Lab. He was a real estate tycoon and the most frugal person I ever met. He had rentals all over Southern California. He would never say how many. It was a tightly held secret but I'm sure that there were at least a dozen, maybe two. He would talk about fixing up houses in Semi Valley, LA County, and apartments as well as beach houses in Orange county.
He never bought his lunch. Instead of buying sandwich bags he used bread bags over and over until the printing wore off. He reused dental floss. I kind of thought that was over the top and have refused to follow such a practice. Whenever we asked him why he didn't buy sandwich bags or anything else he reused, he would answer with a surprised expression, "that costs money!"
About the time Art retired, his wife divorced him. Art sold out and built a place on the beach next to the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii. He is spending is retirement years doing art on the beach.
That car truly did last forever. I bought it when it had 170,000 miles on it and drove it until it had 250,000. I'm sure that I got that many miles because Art took such good care of it. He used to change the oil religiously and during his lunch hour he adjusted the valves. He tried teaching me how to adjust the valves. I tried it once but never attempted it again. I was always happy with the way it purred.
I drove that car until literally the tires fell off and then beyond. One day as I was pulling up to my mail box in front of the house, the front driver's side wheel fell off the car. The CVC joints had been clicking for some time and had gotten progressively worse. I got out of the car and walked into the house and announced to Susan that the Toyota was dead. Fortunately my kind neighbor came out and said he could help me replace the joint and we got it back on the road in no time at all.
I drove that car for quite awhile longer. It developed a leak in one of the transmission seals. The leak was so bad that I bought transmission fluid by the case and added at least at every fill up. When I stopped at lights, the fluid would smoke because it would hit the hot engine and burn. There was always a light film of transmission fluid on the outside of the car which collected dirt. To make things worse, I used to take shortcuts on dirt roads to our tract. The dirt I kicked up coated the outside of the car. I sold that car shortly after that. I was getting too embarrassed to drive it. I'm sure the smoke was breaking some rule of the South Coast Air Quality Management District in Southern California. The car coated in thick dirt was definitely breaking the rules of good taste.
Anyway yesterday I cleaned out the car. I found many things that I had forgotten I had. I found Tressa's treasured key to the Cavalier. This was the one that had the leather pendant on the key ring that she got from the seller. It was under the passenger seat. I found more projects and stuff in the trunk that I had forgotten about. I came to the conclusion that a man's trunk is just like a woman's purse. Every receipt, bit of paper, and piece of gum wrapped up in tissue ever owned can be found there. I will never complain about a woman's purse again.
I was pleased to get $200 for the car. When I sold the Acclaim to the junk yard, they only gave me $35. I guess if you deduct the salvage price from the purchase price I drove that car for only $13 per month and 1.2 cents per mile. That isn't bad at all. Perhaps I have learned a thing or two from Art. And maybe I will be able to retire to the beaches of Hawaii.
Oh, I forgot one thing. As I was driving out of the junk yard parking lot, I remembered that I still had the key to the Toyota on my key ring. I almost turned back but then I remembered, the car is in a junk yard. Who is going to drive it anyway?
