The Slow Perfectionist

So Long, Old Friend

Pepe
August 1998-July 2011

We sold Pepe on Sunday. He died in February of this year, but we had him in our driveway till yesterday afternoon. I’m sad. I’m really sad. And a little confused. It seems over-reactionary or shallow to have such deep attachment to a car. But he was my friend.

He was my first car—a beautiful, black 1995 Toyota 4Runner with tan leather interior and a sunroof. I remember driving to the dealer’s with my dad in 1998 to test drive him. It was just a month before I started my senior year of high school, and I had all the money to buy my dream car. It was some of the first official paperwork I ever signed, and I still have every page.

The first time I heard Switchfoot, Pepe & I lived in Seattle, Washington. I had taken a year out after high school to do a discipleship training program called Master’s Commission. My friend Lucie & I plotted our escape from MC in Pepe on days when we didn’t feel like attending class, scheming to drive all the way to Portland. I got my first 3 tickets, and only moving violations, in Pepe with Sam Richards in 2001 at Frankford & the Tollway in Dallas. I remember listening to Coldplay’s Rush of Blood to the Head on repeat in the 4Runner, and all of the mixed CDs Joshua made me when we were first falling in love. I would sing to The Cardigan’s Long Gone Before Daylight like it was the last time I’d ever sing as I drove down the Tollway or 635 or I-75. The day we moved to Boston, Joshua backed into a dumpster and broke the right rear-view mirror. We never got it fixed. My friend Melissa broke the sunroof late one night when my sister & brother-in-law were first married and lived on Skillman. I never got that fixed either.

Pepe took me from senior year in high school, to Master’s Commission, through college, through my years working at the Trinity Trust, through the first 4 years of marriage, living in Dallas to Seattle to Boston to South Carolina. I carried my nephew and niece in him when they were first born. Joshua & I drove Pepe to San Antonio the weekend we got engaged, and then 4 or 5 more times to plan our wedding. So many memories with that truck, and now he’s gone.

Joshua says it’s normal to have feelings like this for a vehicle. Throughout time people have set up memorial stones to remember, and that’s how it is with Pepe. He was my memorial stone. He was the symbol of my young adult life. From the time I was 18 to 30. I turn 31 this week, and my friend won’t be there.

It was a relief when he died and I knew we’d be getting a new car, a Prius. Better gas mileage, more modern, more indicative of the life we want to live… but no more Pepe. No more hauling recyclables in him, no more florescent green paint stains in the way back, no more putting a tape-thing in to play a portable CD player or rigging an iPod from a cigarette lighter charger. No more buzzing from the front left speaker because the odometer cable had fallen out of place. No more oil leaking from the rear main seal that needs replacing. No more sitting on faux-sheepskin covers my parents bought because the leather seats were cracked and gushing foam stuffing. No more cracked dashboard because I never put up a sunscreen when Dad told me to. No more cracked windshield that grew and grew since the first day I owned him.

I named him Pepe because of the movie Romancing the Stone. When we were kids, my sister and I watched the edited-for-TV version that we’d taped on the VCR at home ad nausium. Our whole family had it memorized. “You want to kill me?! Take me back to Queens and kill me!” an irate Ralph (Danny DeVito) says to his brother Ira. “Aw, dammit man, the Doobie Brothers broke up!” Jack Colton (Michael Douglas) laments in a marijuana smoke-filled haze. “Angel, you are hell and gone from Cartagena,” Jack Colton tells Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) who’s looking for a phone. But Pepe appears when Jack Colton and Joan Wilder approach a local Columbian drug-lord, Juan (played by The Three Amigos’ El Guapo, Alfonso Arau), for a lift: “Oh, the men in the village told you I had a car? They’re such comedians. They mean my little mule, Pepe.” Cut to the next scene where Juan, Joan Wilder, and Jack Colton bust through a gate in a monster truck. Pepe the Columbian monster truck was a hero, and my Pepe was no different.

I’ll miss you my little Pepito. Thank you for all the years of faithful service and sweet memories. I’ll never forget.

Life | July 25th, 2011