A very mild case…..
It is looking like today is the day that we are going to sell my wife’s old car. A potential buyer came and looked at it this last Sunday, left me a deposit in cash, we signed a bill of sale, and decided to wait until Thursday to transfer the title. In an effort to protect myself, I had decided not to let the car go until the title had been definitively transferred out of our name, before our very eyes.
In attempting to the sell the car, we came across some shady dealers who lied to us about being private buyers, but balked at the idea of transferring the title in person. The problem is that it costs a few hundred bucks to transfer titles now days. No dealer is going to want to shoulder that cost – so the objective was to keep it in our name while sitting on their lot to sell. This was not going to happen if I had control over it.
It appears that we’ve found a private buyer now and we are scheduled to meet at the tag agency in about 5 hours from now to make the transfer. The sale isn’t done until its done – but things are looking good right now.
This car, a 1995 Nissan Altima GXE, has been my wife’s car for just over 8 years. At the time she got it, she and I had only been dating for a handful of months. Fast forward to present time, and we’ve been married for over 4 years. As such, that car is intertwined throughout the multitude of events in our common memories.
It is an interesting trait of the mind that one gets sentimental about things. As much as I know analytically that this vehicle is nothing more than a collection of bolted together car parts and has no soul of its own, it does feel in an odd way like we’re losing a good friend. I find it more an interesting empirical observation that these feelings surface in the face of this objective reality. I think it is entirely a function of some mechanism of the mind to prevent/avoid loss. We’ve all incurred losses in our lives, loved ones, pets, etc. I believe there is something analogous to those, more realistic losses, in this more mild loss incident that causes the mind to sort of equate all loss events and to bring such sentimental feelings to the surface.
At any rate, the only thing constant in life is change. As great a vehicle as this Nissan has been, we’ve got another vehicle now that only has about 53,000 miles on it. We will make new memories (likely kids this time) in this new vehicle and will likely feel similar sentimental feelings when it comes time (and it will) to dispose of this one.
I guess in many ways, good or bad, these feelings are part of the human experience.
I remember when I sold my Jeep Cherokee – my first vehicle EVER – and I loved that Cherokee more than my wife did her car. I washed it all the time, did lots of mechanical work on it, etc. However, when I sold it, I honestly don’t remember the event as being too tough on me. I think I was over it within a couple hours. I had a new car at the time, and was looking forward to driving a vehicle that still possessed a marked degree of youth rather than my old one that was approaching 200,000 miles (though still in remarkable shape due to my hard work). Furthermore, my new car got twice the fuel mileage. As a college kid in the formation stages of building a life, this had its place.
Hopefully, the title transfer goes smoothly this afternoon, the buyer drives away and we never hear from him or the car again. As a piece of metal, I wish it good roads and good weather. However, unlike a person or a pet, placement into the best of homes isn’t of particular importance with a vehicle. So long as we get a reasonable price for its sale and get it out of our lives as a, now surplus machine, we’ve attained the best we can attain.
But, its still a mildly sad and melancholy event. One which we’ll be over within 24 hours I am sure.
UPDATE: We sold the car as planned. Now, a week later, we’re happy about it and consider ourselves lucky to have gotten rid of it fairly quickly. A lot of people are stuck with old cars they cannot sell right now.