I bought a car once--the first and only car I have yet owned. It was a 1976 Plymouth Volare that I bought for about $800 from Bar Mitzvah money in the summer before my senior year of high school. It was a spectacularly humongous car and we had many adventures together in the California desert before I left for college at the University of Washington in 2000. Oh, it was a grand old thing. It had an air conditioner, but the newly-charged freon canisters leaked out completely within a month of my buying it, so: no air conditioning. The radio worked, but the speakers were so poor that you could only hear the radio when the car wasn't moving. The windshield was so pitted that it turned into a sheet of light when facing the sun. Combine that with foggy glass on cold winter mornings, and it was a veritable death trap--being driven by a green male teenage driver. I'm amazed I didn't kill scores of people with it. The shocks were no good and it rode low, so it would often bottom out on speedbumps and other abrupt changes in the road level. The headlights were not secure and always vibrated out of alignment; the regular headlights were unusable for that reason, forcing me to drive only with the brights. The car itself was a rust-colored red-orange perfectly suited to my desert environment. It was wide, hogging the whole lane. The steering wheel was fickle; turning it a little and it would do nothing; turn it a touch more and it would veer sharply in that direction. It was hard, so touching it in the hot weather was inadvisable. The brakes would lock alarmingly easy. The windshield wipers simply did not work; the one time I got caught driving in the rain I was lucky enough to have a friend in the passenger seat who stood up, stuck his arm out the window, and operated the wipers manually. The clock on the dashboard kept decent time--when it kept any time at all; sometimes it wouldn't run for weeks. The speedometer was ill-calibrated and became increasingly inaccurate at increasing speeds. I learned this by chance when I realized that my driving at what appeared to be the speed limit resulted in me passing all other traffic and smelling the tires overheating. The radiator leaked. I didn't know about the leak at first because the Volare was both air- and water-cooled and, because of the air-cooling, the car was fine at speed. But at stops the temperature gauge would proceed precariously into the "H" range. A friend of mine looked into the radiator one day at lunch and told me "There's supposed to be water in there. This looks like the Sahara Desert." A tire went blew out on me once, and I cut myself up on my first tire change. But the engine worked, and the transmission worked, and the brakes worked. The car took me to many places. It gave me a place to be myself, by myself. I was sad to leave it behind when I went to college. I left it with my dad, who sold it a few years later.