[MARCH 28, 2000]  Just recently I had the oil changed in my car.

The way the prices have been at the gas stations, I’d just as soon have a service appointment as stop to fill the tank. Besides, the oil change lasts longer.

I’ve often thought that cars and trucks should qualify somehow as dependents for income tax purposes. It seems to me that vehicles rank between a major appliance and a member of the family. They need to be fed, cleaned, maintained, insured and licensed. They need checkups more often than healthy people do.

I’m spoiled, though. The last few years my car has been in one of those delightful stages when gas and oil are about all it needs to keep going. Every 3,000 miles or so I let someone else give it a once-over. I drop off the keys in the morning and pick up the car again in the evening—sometimes for less than a $20 bill.

There was a spell before that when I almost had a standing monthly appointment for auto service. I figured my employer could just as well send one check a month directly over to the repair place. Maybe my car and the technicians were good buddies, but I imagined them saying, "Not this one again." To avoid showing up so often, I went to different shops for some jobs.

I understood what an Iowa friend meant when she took me on a drive to see points of interest in her area. In passing, she identified one place as her car’s "second home." It was a repair shop.

Eventually I had replacements for many of my car’s original parts. Along the way, I also decided to have the top of the car repainted. The guys who did the work over in Mount Pulaski probably wondered about putting in that much effort on an older car like mine, but I enjoyed seeing a shiny surface again after years of sunburn and weathering.

Later, I even had the vinyl roof section replaced. The insurance company helped pay for that, since the original had been cracked by hailstones. Someone told me that a newer car body wouldn’t have withstood the storm as well but that the older ones were "built like a tank."

My car may be of a venerable vintage, but it has a long way to go to match what a cousin wrote about last Christmas. In explaining various problems her husband had dealt with during the past year, she said, "The old Taurus (200,000-plus miles) may be retired permanently. After spending many dollars and many hours on it, he had to rent a tow dolly to haul it home when the front axle broke in half. But, the clincher may have occurred when five lug bolts broke on the front wheel. That left just one, which broke after he finished passing a car and pulled off the road."

In contrast, my car worked fine on a weekend trip a couple of days after the recent oil change. The drive home went so smoothly that I had leisure to think about trips home in the other gray car my parents once owned. That one didn’t have seat belts, and the tires often crunched over gravel roads back then. I’d be falling asleep in the back seat—after one of our country birthday parties, perhaps—as the dark landscape went by under the stars. This time I stayed awake in front as the same stars waited for dusk to arrive.

I guess my car’s recent checkup was its belated birthday present. I came across a letter the other night to confirm the date. My parents sent the news shortly after they brought the new gray car home from the dealership. On the same trip, they’d bought 22-cent stamps, since the postage was about to go up.

The car was the third vehicle my dad ever owned. He managed that by starting at a later age and by keeping each car going for about 20 years, except that he ran out of time with the last one.

I’m continuing the project. I don’t expect to do as well as he did—with his knack for fixing things and his persistence in doing so—but at least this set of wheels has taken me as far as the year 2000.

When my parents announced they’d finally bought the new car, Dad noted that it had about 145 miles on it. "We hope you like it, too," he said. I did, and 15 years later I still do.

[Mary Krallmann]