The Pumpkin

Everyone should have a good "old beater" car in their lives. The old beater in my life, at least the main one, was a 1981 Datsun hatchback that my family gratefully received from an uncle. This car was probably as old as I was, but I think I was the better looking of the two. It was this odd salmon color--I think the registration called it tan, but there is NO way this car was tan. We nicknamed the car Dotty (short for Dotty and an apt description of her personality), aka The Pumpkin, but it was no Cinderella ride. Or maybe it was, given that the shocks on the carriage she rode in were probably on par with Dotty's. Maybe a little bit better.

Dotty had a broken heater/AC, a broken radio, a broken up dashboard, and a speedometer that didn't work. Or at least, didn't work properly. You always knew you were in the 35-45 mph zone when it hovered between 10 and 20 on the speedometer, and you knew you were doing 65ish when the needle whipped back and forth between 10 and 120. And you pretty much never had to worry about going faster than that, because Dotty didn't really do over 65. The gear shift was pretty loose, and I think my little brother accidentally knocked it into reverse or neutral once when he was playing in the car (he was very little) and rolled it down the street into someone else's car. Minimal damage, but Dotty was that kind of car. 

I think I had a fender bender in Dotty once or twice, myself. It may have been Dotty that I was driving when I backed out of a parking space and into a car that I hadn't seen when I started pulling out (I swear, it wasn't there when I looked, I have no idea where it came from!) And I may have been driving Dotty when someone sideswiped me, denting the rear driver side door enough that it didn't open. If I remember right, the insurance company would have written it off, but the amount of money they would have given us wasn't enough to get a new car, so we just kept driving it and used the passenger side door. 

In the winter, you had to scrape the inside and outside of the windows every five minutes. The 1.5 mile drive to school took at least 3 stops to scrape windows, which makes me wonder if it was really that much better to drive. I guess it was somewhat faster, at least, so there were fewer minutes freezing my tush off, but not many. And the car was by no means warmer than I would have been walking. 

We would often drive around town with 8 or 9 people in that little 5-seater hatchback, and of course, the exciting place to ride was in the hatch part. At least, if you weren't a teenager who didn't really fit. It did get a little awkward when a policeman was a car or two away, though.

I don't remember how Dotty met her end, but she did. I hope, though, that she had a good life and didn't feel too picked on by us kids. While I don't ever want to own another Dotty, I do remember her fondly, and hope that my hypothetical kids look forward to having a Dotty of their own to drive someday, because everyone needs an Old Beater like Dotty in their history.