This is our twelve-year-old car. It looks sparkling from this angle, but it’s got quite the dents and dings on it. Still runs great though.

Last Thursday we finally “joined the Prius cult,” as R put it, so we’ve been fixing up the black car in preparation to get rid of it. We were a bit torn about what to do with it. It’s pretty beat up on the outside; there’s no way we’d get much for it. Still, we took it for one last service at our favorite shop, got it aligned, and took it to the fancy-schmancy car wash.

I’m not all that sentimental about cars. I don’t adorn mine with bumper stickers (except last year’s Obama-Biden car magnet), I don’t hang stuff from the rear-view mirror, and when I found out that our only option for color on the Prius was “pearl” (i.e. white, my least favorite car color), I was only temporarily peeved. A car is a tool that gets me where I need to go.

Still, cleaning out the car brought back a lot of memories…

There’s a sticker on the windshield from the hospital where I did my chaplaincy in seminary. I was in my first trimester of pregnancy, and had to work 11 p.m. - 11 a.m. shifts almost every weekend. R would often drive me there, which made it seem less lonely and sad: a queasy pregnant woman, who should be asleep at this hour, getting ready to spend the night dozing on the floor of the pastoral care office, hoping and praying that nobody dies.

The six-disc changer in the trunk (which seems so quaint now) was an upgrade we got after the first radio we’d bought was stolen while the car was sitting in our apartment’s parking lot, practically right below our window. It was a minor burglary, but still shocking to come out for work the next morning and see the pile of shattered window on the passenger seat, gleaming like sea glass.

I found countless maps, including a pocket-sized U.S. atlas which must have been the only map available from some truck stop on a cross-country trek we made.

I found about three ice scrapers in the backseat. I remember we’d bought one of them for Mamala when she moved here and still had her car.

There was a love note I wrote to R, tucked between the seat and the door. I recognized the note paper but couldn’t tell you when I wrote it. I must have put it on the seat one morning since it’s been R’s primary car.

And I remember riding home from the hospital in the backseat, 6 1/2 years ago, holding C’s top-heavy infant head straight as she dozed in her car seat, because OMG won’t it cause her terrible harm to have her head lolling to the side like that???

We’ve done a lot of living in those 12 years.

In the meantime, halfway around the world, there was a family, living in Iraq. I don’t know much about them. They had five children. The father was arrested by Saddam’s regime, tortured, and lost his hand. They are now living as refugees in this country and are being assisted by a woman who attends our church. The father really needs a job, which in this area almost requires having a car.

Very soon, they will drive away in the black car, hopefully into a brighter future.

This makes me very happy.