While a freshman at the University of Missouri, I was always flat broke.  When my friends in the dorm ordered out for pizza, I regularly pretended to be “not hungry.”  They would end up getting me to eat a slice or two “just to be sociable,” then playfully accuse me of gaming them out of paying for my share.

It soon became apparent that I could not afford to care for and feed my 1964 Chevelle, first car I ever owned.  Five hundred hard-earned dollars on wheels.  Nicknamed “The Magnet,” it managed to get hit seven times in six months—never while I was in it.  As a high school senior, my pride and joy was stolen one day in March 1971.  Appropriately enough, it was recovered and hauled to the impound lot on April Fool’s Day, three weeks after its disappearance.  The thieves wrecked and abandoned her in the middle of an intersection, those boys fleeing the scene while my front bumper waved goodbye.  As a final insult, I had to scrape money together to redeem it from the city.  Hammers, Bondo, and spray paint made it the source of cruel humor.  But it ran.  Sort of.

Sometime early in my first semester, between gallons of gas, cases of oil, exorbitant insurance, and multiple repairs, I knew it was time to say goodbye.  When I told my grandparents, they suggested my dad needed a vehicle.  He was back “on the wagon,” and he had a job lined up.  I would have given it to him.  In 18 years, I had never had the opportunity to give him anything, but they insisted on paying me $600 for it.  And it seemed right and good that the old vehicle would stay in the family.  A curious link to a man I barely knew.  We were all painfully aware by now that jobs and sobriety never lasted long, though we would not say so out loud.  Maybe this time would be different.

And so I did my 125-mile trips between Kansas City and Columbia for the rest of the year using the campus rideshare bulletin board or hitchhiking.  My handcrafted “Home and Mom!” sign proved to be an effective, tug-at-the-heartstrings-of-passing-motorists ticket for free trips down I-70.  But I would need transportation for work in the summer.  That’s when inspiration struck.  I would buy a motorcycle!  Mom was not pleased with the idea.  The grandparents were horrified.  And so they approached me with an offer.  Dad had been living down in Louisiana somewhere.  The Malibu had been his mobile home.  But he was back, and the car was only slightly worse for wear.  He wasn’t using it.  It was out of place in their suburban neighborhood.  They gifted it back to me on the condition that I promise to give up my dream of a motorcycle.  To this day, I have never owned one.

And the connection to my Dad grew a bit stronger.  There was an old single-burner Coleman stove in the trunk and a sleeping bag that had outlived its usefulness and a few other vestiges of his last big adventure.  I proudly drove that prodigal vehicle until it would barely go, dating the young and beautiful Peggy McGovney in it.  We still joke that she only married me for my car.  Sold it for $500.  A good investment.  Many times over.  As my senior year at Mizzou began, Dad passed away.  Of all the vehicles I have owned, the midnight blue Chevy Malibu (my first, Dad’s last) remains my favorite.