City Wendy recently shared a great post on letting go of her car in preparation for moving to NYC… It got me to thinking about when I moved to the city, and how hard it was to sell my own:

I remember selling my Jeep when I moved to NYC. Kt remembers that Jeep… it practically defined me (in all my Han Solo glory). A Jeep is a car like an F16 is a plane… it’s more than just transportation. When you drive a Jeep, and you encounter someone else on the road also driving a Jeep, you wave at one another. I don’t know why, but you do. Selling it was one of the hardest things I ever did.

I bought it when I moved out of my mom’s house at 16, and it was the only thing I could count on… even when it broke down it was reliable, in that I could fix whatever was wrong with a crescent wrench, a pair of pliers, and a screwdriver. I drove it distances it was never designed for, in weather it performed poorly in, and with more passengers than was safe. I once had a hitch-hiker ask to be let out because he was scared to ride with me at 70 miles an hour.

The last week I was in Missouri, I made the decision to sell it. My mom mentioned that a guy where she worked had told her how much he liked it… I called him and he came over 45 minutes later. He’d always wanted a Jeep.

He was in his late 40’s and he told me stories of how he had friends with Jeeps when he was younger, and he’d dreamed of having one. I knew that it would be in good hands. It was a ‘79 and I had treated it like a Jeep, so it was a little rough#–bent bumper from running into a pile of snow with a concrete piling hidden in the center, rusted frame from too much mudding in fields South of Springfield, and a lot of personal touches from always doing repair work myself. The man promised me he was going to completely restore it#–it was his dream car.

I sold it to him for $500. I don’t know what it was worth, it just sounded like a good price. I felt a deep loss the moment he pulled away in it#–no one else had driven it, even for a moment, since the day I bought it. Old Jeeps are hard to control, and I didn’t trust anyone to handle it. I almost cried when it turned the corner.

Two years later, I was home visiting my family for Christmas and I saw it driving along 160 Highway just North of Nixa. The paint was new, the bumper was straight, and it had a new top but I recognized it as mine… I had replaced one quarter panel with a ‘77, so the driver and passenger sides didn’t exactly match. You wouldn’t know unless you knew, and that’s how I recognized it as mine. It made me feel good… that Jeep was built the year I was born. It had been through some rough patches, just like me, but there it was, still tooling along. I waved, even though I was driving my step-dad’s mini-van, and the driver waved back. I didn’t own it anymore, but somehow I felt like it would always be mine… that someday, years from now, I would come across it again, recognize the mis-matched quarter panels and buy it back. Probably not for $500, but hey, you never know… the owner might be moving to New York, just starting his own dream.