Farewell to Jenny’s Car

Sometimes I feel as though my wife and I were supporting the U. S. economy unassisted. I’ve already mentioned some major purchases we’ve made this year—a new washer and dryer. This week we were abruptly faced with another unanticipated and unwanted major expense. The other morning my wife went out to start the car she drives to (and for) work. Nothing. She had it towed to the dealer and a day later we received bad news. The problem would be very expensive to repair—completely unjustifiable in an eleven year old vehicle. We would have needed to replace the engine. Nothing we’d done—it was just one of those things. We needed to buy another car and yesterday we did. Perhaps I’ll write about that experience another time.

However, the car that died had been Jenny’s car and we were very saddened to bid it farewell. I may have told this story before but I’ll repeat it here.

Eleven years ago we were faced with a very similar problem—a sudden need to purchase a new car. My wife drove up to the dealer to shop, taking Jenny with her. When she explained what we were looking for to the salesperson he said, “We don’t get cars like that in very often but let’s look in the lot.” As they walked up and down the rows of new cars, Jenny suddenly dragged my wife to a car. They looked in the window and the car had every single feature we wanted. They brought the car up to the front, Jenny jumped in, and hopped onto the back seat as if to say “No need to dilly-dally around. Wrap it up, boys! We’ll take this one.”

Thereafter that car was always “Jenny’s car”.

Jenny’s car has been a good and reliable car and we’ve had many adventures in it. It has given us good and faithful service and we can only hope that its successor will do so as well.