Ode to the Malibu (taylor's version)

(expanded version)

So I sold the 1972 Malibu.  Not sure why I did that, other than how many lightly used assets can a guy have?  I didn’t use it much, and really didn’t see a time in the future when that would change.  Even road trips aren’t a go to since I have a Class B travel van, also lightly used.

It is a fine car - perfectly suited to me - a non-motor head, a non-car guy - a car that you turned the key and it started and ran well.  The heat worked. The AC not so well. It had a cassette deck and I carried around an old school cassette holder case. A car that wasn't so nice you were afraid to take out a drive.  Good looking design, white interior, white convertible top, big motor, smooth ride. I fell for it the first time I saw it.

It had an old-school cigarette lighter that Lucas and his friends loved heating up and touching.  It had a motorized top that even after 6 years I couldn’t remember if the ‘up’ direction on the switch meant putting the top ‘up’ (closed) or ‘up’ (as in open).  Did ‘down’ mean closed, or did ‘down’ mean open?

The large seats were incredibly comfortable, like a couch.  You could ride all day with little in the way of stiffness.  I sit in my 2018 Mercedes 400 coupe (a neat 2 door that seats 4 easily inside) for 45 minutes and start to ache and pain (this is also lightly used).

The got smiles and thumbs ups wherever I went, and everyone wanted to talk about the car.  Which presented a few problems: 1, I don’t really like talking to people, especially spontaneously, and 2, a lot of the men wanted to talk about the car, ‘what’s under the hood’, stories about their old cars, stories about a car they owned about the same era, and a lot of other car talk which 1, I no nothing about, and 2, have zero interest in. Pull up to a traffic light, with my Led Zeppelin ripping from the stereo, cool sunglasses, dog by my side - you could see how it could enjoin a lot of wistful thinking and thumbs ups and smiles.

So other than looking really good in the car, and enjoying driving the old machine, I was a poor fit for a classic car.  It was fun to drive, a 1972, with only seatbelts that went around your waist - meaning if you were ever in an accident the physics of it would snap your head right into the steering wheel.  Driving that car was not like a modern car where you could break too fast, wait too long to navigate a corner, etc…. You had to dance with her, respect her, drive with true respect for driving basics and fundamentals.  The margin for makeup was much less than in a new car with disc brakes and tight steering. Rear wheel drive with big tires. The dial you monitored to see what gear you were in was off, so you had to make sure you weren't in L2 when you needed to be D. It used unleaded gas, but just barely.

I took on 2 long trips - one, a 3000 mile odyssey from NE PA, through PA to Pittsburgh with my 22 yr old nephew and son Lucas, over to Ohio to the football hall of fame, up to Detroit, cross over to Canada and by a warm darkening summer evening rode the coast of Lake Huron north for a few hours before stopping for the night, playing car games like one where you go through the alphabet by what letters you can find on road signs, license plates and the like, always struggling with the Q's.  Getting back at it in the morning heading to Killarney, which is the tip of Huron, on a spit, and that brings a funny story to mind.  Searching for information about Killarney prior to taking off, I was enchanted by green grassy knolly similarities of Ireland, and at some point late in the game, realized I was actually looking at pictures of Killarney Ireland and not Killarney Canada. Killerney Canada was cool, as was the hotel we stayed at, but the horse flies were huge and it was a bit comical to see women in bikinis by the pool pretending not to care about flies the size of small birds biting them.

From Tobermory, we crossed a body of water to our mostly northern point, and then swung southeast for a long day drive to Toronto, easing in to towns like Ocean’s Eleven characters, then after a few days, down into Buffalo and across NY and PA back home.  She rode like a dream, purred like a kitten. We left the large spare tire at home since we needed room in the trunk. We had gas anxiety a few times as our half tank indicator dropped into the 'need fuel' range with little warning - at one point I stopped at a vacant construction site (it was the weekend) and siphoned off some gas from a portable gas jug I found (I've been traveling my whole life - a little bit of theft in tough spots is the the nature of the journey, and you try and pay it forward in some unrelated way to some person somewhere down the road).

Football Hall of Fame, below:

I left the headlights on a few times since the only way they went off was to push in the button.  How many times i can't count would I enlist the passengers to help me to remember to turn the lights off (especially early evening) and although the promises to assist were easily given, the actually memory to help was never actually given - literally, not once, across a broad diversity of passengers. The high beams was a button you tapped with your left foot.  And the gas tank filler was underneath the license plate, which was truly a funny story the first time I needed gas, and stood there bewildered trying to figure out how to fill it up, going so far as to look in the glove compartment, under the hood with the engine and a bunch of other places a gas cap would never be.  Of course I couldn’t ask anyone in my small town, since that would be a humiliation, so I grabbed a rag or t-shirt or something and pretended to wipe down the finish as I nonchalantly scoured the vehicle for the gas cap. It took a while. I played it cool. I mean, I lived in a small town, population like 1200, so the idea that Petersheim who already was rumored to be way to big for his britches, bought an old car and couldn't figure out how to fill it up with gas, that was just too good of a story to let out in the open.

Above, Amish farm in Sugarcreek Ohio, where my stepmother was living. The Amish farmer, plain as plain can be, got some ribbing from the wider Amish community about the cherry red convertible in his driveway. Of course, not by text or email or telephone.

The fuel gauge was never accurate, and went wildly up and down with the acceleration, and when it half full, it would decline into ‘empty’ with hard to predict steadiness. Hence the fuel range anxiety when on long road trips to out of the way places.

The above picture is funny because we had just finished a 90 minute hike around a little island off the mainland, and the complaining, pouty faces, swearing that went on for that 90 minutes one would have thought they were embarked on the Native American Trail of Tears, or the American/Filipino Bataan Death March.

Lulu and I also took it on a long trip down through Virginia, to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and back home. Man and dog, with a lot of envious smiles from men my age.

So she’s gone.  You can’t really just keep accumulating lightly used assets.  I mean, I guess you can, but that’s not really my game.  I’ve toyed around with selling it for a year or two.  With Lucas turning 16 and ‘needing’ a car, something really had to give, and in this situation, it was the 1972 Malibu, a sweet car if there ever was one. Gained a St Pete's top floor condo, a 2022 Hyundai Kona for Lucas, and lost a Malibu. The sale of it, its departure, is actually engendering more strong feelings for it then I had while it was in my garage - the closing of a chapter, life moves on, the Malibu was part of a season.

And, to connect a few recent blog posts, back in 2015 I thought it was a good idea to have the company buy the car initially, and use it as a marketing and PR tool/vehicle, and get the benefit of the maintenance expenses and depreciation. And then when I went and sold it (to the first guy who looked at it), I now owe the sales price as a tax, since it's cost basis is zero, having taken the tax benefits in years prior.

Lulu is a pretty perfect dog. Smart as a whip, always ready for whatever I throw her way. But she has this one quirk. She doesn't really know how to, or maybe she doesn't enjoy it, the head out the window hair in the wind posture you see dogs all over the world doing with abandon. She might creep her nose towards the open window, enjoy the breeze from deeper in the car, but Lulu isn't that dog you see coming down the road, first a bit unclear of what is sticking out the window from the oncoming car, but then as it gets closer its the familiar shape of a dogs head of most varieties enjoying the air in the fur and life on the road.

Bluejays game.

Interesting how AI, unfiltered from human prejudice and politics, described the 'Trail of Tears' - "The Trail of Tears was a forced migration of approximately 60,000 Native Americans from the "Five Civilized Tribes" that took place between 1830 and 1850. The United States government ethnically cleansed the Native Americans and their enslaved African Americans."

You don't hear 'ethnically cleansed' much in the schoolbooks, even as they have acknowledged the actions of the Americans. But the truth be da truth.