A few days ago I did something I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. I made the last payment on my car.
How I got here was an adventure in itself. My first two cars were hand-me-downs. When Dad bought a used Oldsmobile as the new family car, I got the slightly younger Chevrolet we’d had since I was 6. It was faded and getting a little wheezy, but it was plenty enough for my daily commutes to and from college. When I went off to graduate school, the Chevy was retired and I got the Oldsmobile, since Dad had bought a used Buick Park Avenue for him and Mom. That Oldsmobile and I went on many an adventure together. It was big and underpowered, its paint was cracking, and it bore suspicious welds that made me think it had been in a really bad wreck at some point before we bought it. That car had been around. But it rode like a cloud.
The Oldsmobile was what took me, and as many of my belongings as I could cram into it, to Florida when I moved there in mid-2000. Somewhere around Palm Beach, the alternator light flickered on. I managed to limp into Fort Lauderdale. A few days and a new alternator later, things were fine again. I saw a puddle of brake fluid under the car a few weeks later, and Midas got a good bit of money to make things right. Not fun when you don’t have a job.
A couple months into my stay, I did get a callback and ended up with decent employment. But the Oldsmobile was having none of it, and more little things continued to go wrong – nothing major, but just enough to tell me I’d best do something soon. I’d been raised in a GM family, and I wanted to stay loyal. So one day in September 2000, I took delivery of a new two-door Chevy Cavalier, a cute little silver job with a little bump on the trunk lid that was supposed to suggest a spoiler. I was so proud of that little car. At the end of the month, I drove the Oldsmobile back home for its formal retirement, and then flew back to Florida.
The Cavalier made the move back to South Carolina with me, and then over the summer of 2001 made a couple trips back and forth as I closed things out in Florida and set things up in my new old home. It wasn’t any great shakes as a car. Its inline-four engine had all the power of a washing machine motor, and the interior was full of plastic that didn’t take long to turn brittle. It was a product of peak turn-of-the-century GM mediocrity. I’d remained loyal to the Bowtie, only to find out that the Chevrolet of my youth had gone the way of the passenger pigeon. But that little Cavalier held together and we went everywhere, it seemed. And few things felt as happy as the day in 2005 that I made the last payment on that car. I was still kind of young, and there was a pride I took in that achievement. Every last cent I paid for that car had been my own, earned with my own work. Nothing about it had been given to me.
It felt good to not have a car payment, and I planned to drive that car forever. In it I drove to conferences in Georgia and Alabama, with a quick jaunt over the Mississippi border just to say I’d been there; several trips to Florida, including a crazy and enjoyable extended adventure on another conference trip in 2014 and a 2008 adventure to see a Shuttle launch; and our biggest adventure, to Indianapolis and then Evansville and back in 2015. There’s a memory I have from that trip, and I cherish it: driving along at speed, somewhere between Evansville and Bloomington on a deserted Interstate 69, on a picture-perfect afternoon in early June, and it seemed like things couldn’t get any better.
Of course, they didn’t. About a month and a half later, the air conditioning system quit working. It was going to be an expensive fix for a car with nearly 180,000 miles on the Hobbs. Before the summer was out, I signed a three-year lease on a shiny black Toyota Corolla sedan. Like the Cavalier, it was a smaller car for basic transportation, but “basic transportation” in 2015 was far better appointed than in 2000. The lease payments weren’t much, and I kept the Cavalier as a utility car until its cooling system finally let go rather spectacularly in 2017. I cried the day it was hauled off. It was like losing a member of the family.
The Corolla went on a lot of adventures with me, including a completely bonkers trip in the summer of 2017. The first stop was Indianapolis and the museum at the Speedway, and then it was on to Madison, Wisconsin to do some research for the book I was starting to write about Dave Garroway. Outside Rockford, Illinois there was a torrential Midwest storm I drove through, on a crowded Interstate highway. As I started down a cloverleaf, hail started pelting the car and visibility went zero-zero. Only through divine intervention did I not plow into the back of the semi in front of me.
In early 2018 it was clear I was going to run well past the mileage allotment on the Corolla’s lease. A smarter version of me would have just started planning to buy the little one when the lease was up. Instead, I got ambition. I wanted something that felt more like my station in life, a car that made me feel I’d achieved it. Never mind that the Corolla was doing just fine for everything I needed, of course. I got ambition, or maybe ambition got me. And, after serious flirtation with the Mazda 6 after a couple of test drives (and, man, did I love that thing), I swapped the Corolla for a Camry XSE, just off the assembly line. It didn’t have the elegance of the Mazda, but it had things all its own that I liked when I test-drove one. Plus, it was a Toyota, a known quantity with plenty of service opportunities nearby. I was so proud the day I took delivery. Finally, I had a big and sporty car of my own, one that was actually something I wanted instead of settling for.
The Camry started out as a lease. Over time, though, I realized I didn’t want to go through the agonies of buying a car for a long time. On January 6, 2021, I took the car back to the dealership. While it was up on the rack in the service department, I was in the front going through the agonies of paperwork and financing and everything else. When we were done, the Camry was out front, all nice and clean after service and a run through the car wash. It seemed like a great day, until I got home and learned what had happened at the Capitol.
Of course, a buyout meant I’d gotten myself into another installment contract for a few years – on top of my student loans and credit cards. At least with the car, it was going toward reliable transportation that I knew would see me through just about any trip I’d need to take. The many road trips we’ve been on together have borne this out: Maryland, Florida, Tennessee, Alabama, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia are all in the Camry’s logbook. I’ve had family members, students, even two or three sorta well-known people as passengers. I’ve parked that car next to the greatest ship ever built. I’ve seen the Empire State Building through that car’s windows. Yes, we’ve got stories.
In all these adventures, the car’s mechanical soundness has never been a worry, and I’ve been religious about keeping up with service intervals. Of late, I’ve been doing it myself; not only oil and filter changes, but recently I redid the brakes and replaced the struts and shocks. It continues to be reliable and ride well. In fact, the only issue I’ve really had with the car has been with the huge wheels and rubber-band tires on the XSE model. They do not like potholes or road hazards, and I’ve lost count of how many tires I’ve replaced over the years. I finally installed 17″ wheels with more substantial tires, and although this configuration isn’t as sleek as the factory setup, it means a lot less worry. (I also replaced the doughnut spare with a matching wheel and tire, which means even less worry.)
Through all these years, I’ve continued to make that monthly payment, steadily paying it down, getting ever closer. Until that magic day this week when the payoff was close enough that I could goose my regular payment with some money from my savings, and the magic words PAID IN FULL appeared.
It reminded me of how I felt almost four years ago when I paid off my student loans. I’d dreamed of that day for more than 20 years, remembered how it felt when I got that first invoice. It was like telling me to climb Denali. But how do you climb a mountain? One step at a time. And, so I did. Came that glorious day in August 2022, when the last payment went in…and I remember wishing there were fireworks or flashing lights, like the pinball machine in “The Time Of Your Life” (or the scoreboard at Old Comiskey that it inspired). Instead, my great achievement was marked with a whisper.
There weren’t fireworks, but there was instead a feeling of quiet accomplishment. I did it. I didn’t begrudge the people whose student loans were being forgiven around that time; heck, if I’d had a higher balance at the time I’d have applied too. (In fact, I had seriously looked into the public service loan forgiveness program, only to learn that refinancing my loans through an eligible program would have taken as much time as just paying them off as they were.) I don’t wish student loan debt on anybody, and I don’t begrudge anybody who got forgiveness or other help, not at all. But there’s something I feel when I look at my payoff letters: the knowledge that this big thing I overcame was mine. It’s how I felt then, and it’s a feeling I had again this week when those three glorious words appeared on my computer screen.
It’s not like I can suddenly go nuts with all this money that will no longer go toward a car payment. There’s still a couple or three consumer accounts that need to be retired and a mortgage that’s creeping toward payoff. All the while, I need to build up my savings and get some other things going so I can prepare for my next act, once I’ve had enough of teaching. (Not retirement, mind you, because I’ve long known that if I don’t have something to do, I’ll go stark raving mad.)
But even with what’s ahead, this is a moment to enjoy. I did, the other day, as I walked out front and saw that sleek blue machine in the driveway, and thought to myself: “This is my car now.”
It took a long time, but it was worth it.
