ericgooch

We used to have a Ford Explorer. I say used to, because of course, we don’t anymore.

My wife bought that car before we met, and went on many road trips and adventures with it. If she was driving and hit a bad bump in the road, she would say “sorry!” and pat it on the dashboard. It served us well for a number of years, but the repairs got to be more frequent, and more expensive.

You reach a point when you’re spending more on repairs than you would be for payments on a newer car, and it’s time to trade up.

We ended up at a dealership here in Elko, and bought a used Jeep. As we were finalizing the paperwork, I think it was really starting to dawn on my wife that she was going to be leaving her car behind now, and she was visibly disturbed by this. Although she had spent more time with it than I had, I realized that I felt saddened at this realization as well.

After the paperwork was finished and the new keys handed over to us, it was time for the final check to make sure we had all our stuff out of the “old” car. As we got everything out and were walking away, my wife was trying not to cry, which affected me as well, and I thought “How does this happen?”

How do we assign a personality to, or experience loss from a machine? Rationality tells us this is nothing more than a collection of parts, a compilation of chrome, plastic and steel. We tell ourselves it’s silly to get worked up over an inanimate object, that we’re not abandoning it or being disloyal. The problem of course, is that it’s not the machine itself, but the memories that we have woven inextricably into it, of the times we have had together.

We slid through blizzards in icy mountain passes. We crawled through hostile, cracked deserts. We drove along coastlines, edged around rocky precipices and crept through dark forests. These trips, these memories, where do they go?

We have a Jeep now, waiting for it’s adventures and memories of it’s own. We move on with the sensible, practical knowledge that we’ve done the right thing.

But somewhere back in the gray distance, a ghost in the machine forgets for the last time.

Tags:strangeness, the mind