Ava

I knew today had to come. My first car, the beautiful, big, red Mercury Sable, has long been in disrepair and has been sitting unused in our driveway since about October. The main problem is that the front left tire is perpetually flat and nothing we try can fix it. When I say flat, I don't just mean a little low. I mean it is monumentally flat. It is so flat that it is folded.
Additionally, the car needs all sorts of other repairs that are just too expensive for a car this old. So, we decided to donate my lovely vehicle.
It didn't really occur to me until last night, when I went out to say my final goodbyes, but this car was a pretty major event in my life. First of all, as my first ever car, it is obviously symbolic of freedom, independence, yadda yadda yadda. My parents bought it for me (THANK YOU!) after my sophomore year in college, and I soon after graduated into the life phase in which one no longer asks parents for permission to go places and do things. I didn't need to borrow their car, so I just took my own. I drove out to Yonkers to visit Vanessa and Amanda. I drove myself back to college ALONE for six hours on I-95 (not a big deal to me now, but I was so petrified that day that my hands never left their perfectly placed 10 and 2 positions and I was physically shaking from nerves when I finally got to Virginia). I drove my friends to airports (always a grown up thing to do) and got a job at college. And when I started dating Jeremy, this car was the ticket to actually getting to see him over the summers. In short, my first car = semi-adulthood. Yikes.
As I sat in my car last night, I decided the best way to say goodbye would be to replicate the first night I got her. Unfortunately, the flat tire and dead battery rendered it undriveable, so I settled for buckling my seat belt (I'm very safety conscious) and grabbing my iPod to play the very same first song I ever listened to when I took my car out for the first spin.
I sat in the dark listening to Usher's "U Don't Have to Call" (comment not, people - I was in college, and I still kind of like the song), reminiscing about driving oh-so-cautiously but feeling oh-so-cool in my honking soccer mom sedan as I toured the teeming streets of South Orange, NJ. Ava certainly wasn't the hippest thing around, but I never felt anything but love for her. She always treated me well; besides one scary experience of the brakes going out, nothing major ever happened with this car.
Sadly, however, time marches on, and eventually thirteen year-old cars start to show their age. We finally bit the bullet and decided to donate the car to charity, mainly because we would have been wracked by guilt had we sold this loveable but now dangerous car to some innocent, unsuspecting teenager. Thus, this morning my beautiful longtime vehicular companion was carted off by Lachaim to Life.
Ava, I will miss you ever so much.