Key in the ignition. Nothing. Turn air conditioner on. Turn on the heater. Open driver side door. Slam it behind me. Lift up hood. Look inside for I don’t know what. Slam the hood shut. Open and slam the passenger door. Open and slam the back door three times. Open driver’s door and slam it. Put the key in the ignition. It starts. This is the Cherokee Dance done with love at least two to three times a week. Perhaps it is time to take my old 1995 Jeep Cherokee into the shop for a tune-up. With her 201,501 miles, she is running a little sluggish these days, and some days has no get up and go at all. Back in June 2004, she was diagnosed with a condition that would eventually result in transmission failure. For six years now, she has beaten the odds and keeps chugging along without first gear. She does zero to 35 in about four and half minutes. Yeah that was me the other day; I made you late for work. But as long as I don’t pull out into traffic or have to be at my destination too fast, my old girl gets me where I need to go.
Some say (well mostly my husband’s parents) that it is time to retire her to the junkyard, but that would be like euthanizing Grandma. Our Cherokee, which was an engagement gift from my parents, has been a part of our family since the summer of 1996 and has been part of every crucial milestone in my adult life. My husband and I drove her from Pennsylvania to Texas to Colorado to start our lives together in the Rocky Mountains in 1996; we brought home our first child in the backseat in 1999. To keep him from getting lonely, I sat with him in the backseat for the first three years of his life until his sister came along in a matching car seat. We then drove our beloved vehicle back to Texas in 2002 and had two more kids. When we returned to Colorado in the summer of 2008, the mechanic recommended that we tow her. Just another naysayer. We did not listen and she made the trip like a disabled triathlon runner in the Special Olympics.
Yes, it is true that when our family of six needs to ride in her five passenger capacity body we have to draw straws to see which family member stays at home. This is why; the old girl mostly remains in the pasture known as our driveway while we comfortably voyage in a red Dodge Grand Caravan complete with a navigation system, a DVD player, stow-and go storage and leather seats. Sure, it has a nicer chassis, but who develops an emotional attachment to a Dodge? The minivan may be newer and more functional than a vehicle with only five seats, two-doors, manually operated windows, locks that you have to remember to push down and technicolor coffee and milk stained upholstery that carries most illnesses that are typically only found in Third World Countries, but the Dodge minivan will never be a member of our family like our beloved Jeep Cherokee.
