Carter Turns 20

I first met Carter in a parking garage at the Burbank Airport. My parents had met my flight and walked me out of the terminal. When they came to an awkward stop in the garage, I got irritated and asked them, "Where's the car?" One of them pointed to a shiny, new red Honda Civic, said "That's it," and told me it was mine. The car was an early graduate school graduation gift. I was absolutely stunned.

Of course, the car wasn't called Carter yet. That came a couple of years later, after I had developed a deep and intuitive sense of Carter's carsonality (yes, I just made up a word). Carter was a striver, but not a loudmouth; more "little engine that could" than hot rod. The name occurred to me gradually, inspired by two earnest, often-underestimated characters who always seemed to mean well: John Carter, a medical student on the popular new NBC TV show E.R.; and Jimmy Carter, one-term President of the United States.

Carter went everywhere with me. For a couple of years we made the grinding daily commute (only 2 miles, but taking up to 40 minutes) between my Brentwood apartment and my job at a law firm in Westwood. In December 1994 we traveled with my brother and all of my possessions over the Rocky Mountains, across the Great Plains, through the Tennessee Valley and up the East Coast to my new home and job in Boston. In June 1996 we headed back to California with my friend Barak, stopping in Washington DC, Chattanooga, St. Louis, Zion National Park and Las Vegas. Carter shuttled me between my apartment in La Jolla and my job as a community organizer and nonprofit manager in San Diego's Hillcrest neighborhood, with frequent 300-mile round trips to Los Angeles to see my parents or old friends. In 2003 Carter moved my wife Sharon and I to our new home in Maryland, where I took a job with a certain Baltimore-area university still a few years from being called the number one "up-and-coming" university in America.

The years have bleached and peeled Carter's paint, worn holes in his carpeting, and faded his radio console to the point of invisibility. The hatch has a broken hinge, and the air-conditioner is almost beyond repair. Carter has no right side-view mirror, no passenger-side airbag, no CD player, no halogen lights. For the past few years, even my parents have been telling me it's time to let Carter go, to get a new model, something more functional, more appropriate to this stage in my life.

But no. Call it frugality, or loyalty to an old friend, or even misplaced affection for a mere object. Call it whatever you like. I'm sticking with Carter for as long as he will carry me, and not steering him into the sunset.