Throwback Thursday: Annamaniacs - In Memory of a Plymouth Voyageur Mini-Van

So while looking through my files for an old humor column, I looked under "cars". Turns out I wrote a lot about cars. And it was all funny. And it was hard to pick one. Warning - there may be a lot of car Thursdays on this blog. This one was dated 2004. Just know, that I have upgraded from this. *****

In Memory of a Plymouth Voyageur Mini-Van

By Anna Maria Junus

My van finally bit the dust. One day he just decided to not go anymore. So instead of reviving him once again I let him go where all auto’s go to die.

But first I allowed expert surgeons to remove the parts of his body that were still good and use them to save the lives of other vehicles.

It was time. He needed to be put out of his misery. He was suffering terribly.

In the end I doctored him along. I put water in the radiator before taking him anywhere. I didn’t go far for he would tire out quite easily or get mad and start steaming. I tried to avoid my driveway since my vans bottom had dropped (I suffer from that malady too).

While driving him I would picture his bottom suddenly falling out and I would have to brake like Fred Flintstone. Or worse I could see his whole body suddenly disintegrate into dust while I was left with just a seat and a steering wheel in the middle of the highway.

He never liked to start. Even in good weather. He coughed and complained and thought about it. “I don’t want to start. I don’t want to start. I don’t want to start. Oh. All right. Just this once.” He preferred to be a driveway potato, never going anywhere, never doing anything interesting.

His back end door didn’t close properly and he refused to lock himself up, “if someone thinks I’m important enough to take me they can have me”. He wanted fresh air all the time, even in winter, so that if you dared to roll down the power windows, he would refuse to roll them back up again. He even took to rolling his own windows down, sneakily, a little at a time while driving. I had to put a stop to that and had someone permanently close the window, which didn’t make drive throughs or parking meters easy. And it made my van upset enough to find another problem to create.

He hated music. He coughed out or hung on to cassette tapes. He refused to stay on one music station for longer than ten minutes. Often he would scan the radio stopping to listen to one song and then suddenly darting off in the middle of it searching for something else, like a man with a remote control, unable to settle on anything.

He coughed and rattled, moaned and groaned. He threatened to take his steering wheel off. The inside roof started stripping. The glove box under the front passenger seat disintegrated. He went blind in one eye. He became addicted to gasoline and could never get enough.

And so when he finally did refuse to move, I didn’t fight him anymore. It was time to replace him with a new model. Well, new to me. Something that hadn’t been around the block quite so much, was in better shape and didn’t have quite so much baggage to carry.

*****

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