so this is going to be for columbia/ harvard. Feedback is appreciated! Also, which topic would this best fit under?
For years my father drove a light blue eighty- something Honda. It was a real mess of a car that smelled like cardboard and stale coffee due to early morning mishaps and samples of corrugated crammed in the back seat for clients. The Honda and I have a long, complex history.
It seemed like it was out to get me from the beginning. It made me late or absent to school several times. I can recall more than one occasion where the battery died, and one particular time when it was stolen from the car port at our apartment, making me miss nearly the entire last day of first grade. I was more upset that I missed the first half of Milo and Otis than I was that it was stolen. It even tried to kill me once. While waiting in the car for my dad to finish browsing through a yard sale, it tantalized me with a Lifesaver in its door pocket and made me choke. The handle to roll down the window was broken, leaving me gasping for air like a fish out of water until my dad came to my rescue.
It also saw its fair share of hard times. When my parents got divorced, it was the vessel that first took me from my mother's house that I had always known to my dad's new place a couple miles away. It was the car that my brother used to cry in when he was mad at my dad for wanting a divorce, or when he was angry that he was being forced to visit.
When my dad commuted back and forth to Mexico throughout the week for work, it was the vehicle that provided the transportation. Whenever I would call him during his trips home, I could hear a faint ringing sound coming from the inside of the car. "Dad," I would interrupt," put your seat belt on."
One night, my father called because he had stopped by my mother's house on her day with us to show us a surprise. I was shocked to run into the driveway and see him parked in a brand new Ford Taurus, not the battered Honda I had been so accustomed to. I was surprised at how much I would come to miss that unreliable car. It facilitated a lot of my childhood, from trips to soccer practice to emotional rides back and forth between my parents' households. As faulty as it was, it was actually one of the more constant things in my life compared to the turbulence around me, and it took it being gone for me to notice.
As a teenager I realize that the cars my father drove represented what I was going through personally. When my parents divorced I was as tattered and broken as the Honda, but I gradually came to terms with the change and was renewed, like the Taurus. We all moved on, and I learned that you have to let go of the past to move on to the future. For all our conflicts, the Honda and I are a lot alike. It had its flaws and hiccups, but it managed to do its job and persevere, much like I have.
