The car of my childhood was a 1972 navy blue Volvo 145 station wagon. It was, if I am to believe my father, a luxury car when it was bought. At least this is what he told us, when we bitterly complained about it, all through the 80s and 90s as it repeatedly broke down.
It seemed cursed from the start. While being transported on a ferry from Geneva to England, someone tried to rip out the stereo. At least that was the theory. It was easier to suspect attempted theft than that something was wrong with the stereo all along. The stereo was replaced, but the speakers were at the exact height from the window crank so that when you manually rolled the window down, you took a small but agonizing lump of skin off your thumb with the mesh stereo cover.
The car was heavy, ungainly. “Like a tank” people would say as if this was a good thing. Like a tank, it was hard to maneuver, hard to stop and hard to ignore. Waiting to be picked up from middle school, I could hear it several blocks away, fan belt whinnying like a horse, the guttural rattling of the engine giving me fair warning to brace myself for the embarrassment. On summer afternoons, my mom would take us to the beach at Half Moon Bay. There was a hill you had to stop at on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to get on 280 for the beach. I vividly remember my mom’s hand on the gear shift, one foot on the brake, one foot on the clutch, other hand holding the handbrake, eyes darting to the rear view mirror as she silently prayed the car wouldn’t roll down the hill into the Mercedes behind us.
It broke down with such alarming regularity, that we had our own mechanic who actually came to the house to do work on it. My father carried spare brake cables, clutch cables and taught me how to repair a broken fan belt with a pair of tights, just in case. Just in case happened all the time. Once, the clutch cable broke on a trip up to the mountains to view Haley’s comet. If memory serves (and I’ve tried to block it out) we coasted several miles down winding roads in second gear. When we got home, no one spoke. Another time on the freeway, the gear shift came off in my father’s hand, or maybe my mother’s – the stories and lore surrounding the Volvo are never very clear in my head, because there were simply too many of them to keep track. I remember not really understanding what had just happened as I stared at the gear shift, the wires dangling like broken arteries. A family friend once told my mother and me (when my dad had stepped out of the room): “You know, I can fix that car, so it never drives again.” She laughed uneasily but I could see she was considering it.
At some point the Volvo was renamed Le Volvo, the same way people call Target Tarjay, as if by making it sound French we could lend it some sophistication. It didn’t help. Le Volvo was probably the only thing my mom openly wept over. Le Volvo would leave her stranded at a grocery store, at the post office, at work, at home, on the freeway…everywhere and anywhere she could be stranded, she was. When she’d eventually make her way home, she’d wait for my dad on the back steps, fuming. “That Volvo,” she’d start, when he rode up the drive on his bicycle. And my sister and I would scatter.
When I graduated from college, my parents offered me the car. Desperation for transportation somehow eclipsed the bad memories and so I accepted. One evening, after having too much to drink, I took a cab home and left the Volvo in a parking lot in downtown Palo Alto. When I went to retrieve it the next morning, it was gone. I promptly called the police, who came out and after getting the description of the car, said they doubted the car had been stolen. It was far more likely I’d forgotten where I’d parked. They were right. No one would steal it.
A few years later even my father had to acknowledge it was time to let the car go. By then the car had been replaced by a Toyota that was unfailingly reliable. Le Volvo was simply taking up driveway space. In the end we donated it to the American Lung Association. My mother figured it was only fair, Le Volvo had been polluting people’s lungs for decades. I was pregnant when we donated it and it seemed fitting that we take the picture above…saying goodbye to the car of our childhood while waiting for the next child to join the family.
