When I was a kid, we didn’t have a whole ton of money. Every car we ever had as far back as I was alive to really remember them (with one exception) was either used or a hand me down. In 1992, my parents decided that the time of having hand me down after hand me down was over, and they bought the first new car I could ever remember (again, with one exception).

That’s the 1992 Dodge Spirit we had. Oh sure it wasn’t top of the line, but it was ours. It had that new car smell. It had working air conditioning. It had a 3.0 liter V6 engine as compared to the 2.2 liter 4 cylinder the prior car, a 1988 Plymouth Sundance, had.

That car made it to West Virginia 3 times in its life, and helped us move to Staten Island from Brooklyn. It also served as my mom’s “everyday car” going to work both when we lived in Brooklyn and when we lived in Staten Island, making the 2 hour commute to Brooklyn every day.

Last week, it started gushing oil, and our mechanic warned my dad that if he continued to drive the car, it may just leave him wherever he stopped it. He finally decided the time had come and after 15 years, he parted with the car we bought on a shoestring the year it came out, donating it to charity with the hopes of getting a halfway decent tax write-off.

I’m gonna miss it. Sure it was a car, and in reality, it’s a family car. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t luxurious. What it was, however, was ours, and I’m going to miss it.

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