Some things are better left forgotten, and the 1989 Ford Escort station wagon I bought right out of college is probably one of them. Having a job and some down payment money, I certainly could have picked better. A base level Corolla, for instance. Anyone with half a brain would have bought one of those little four cylender Toyota trucks while they were still making them.
But not me. No, I had to be different from my brothers who had both bought pick up trucks right out of school. Of course they had. You move all the time when you are a young single guy. Plus there is that whole fantasy of packing everything into the truck and moving to Flagstaff, which kind of fades away once you have a family. So the truck would have made all sorts of sense.
Which is why I bought the station wagon. Because you can pack some stuff in there. Sort of. Plus it was cheap, which I can to this day confuse with being a responsible consumer. (Here is a hint: it’s not.) Looking back, it’s obvious that being seen as responsible is not the first thing that is going to get you dates. I imagined I was being subtle.
But I hated even getting in that car. There is no good way to explain the sense of existential angst which washed over me every time I sat down behind the wheel. It really wasn’t the car’s fault. Something about the grey plastic steering wheel and the lumpy stereo controls served as a continual reminder of compromise. The seat belts that rattled forward when the door opened and rattled back when it shut did not help. Not even the fact that it was a stick shift could convince me that the car was sporty.
It was probably less that $3,000 which seems impossible now. Back then you could get reliable, if totally unsexy, cars cheap. Obvs, you get what you pay for. When the battery needed replacing, I decided to trade the sucker in. There were probably like 3 payments left, but I did not care. I got a Nissan Stanza. Now that’s a sexy car. Am I right, ladies?