Corollas and Pintos

The topic of cars and whether or not you name your car was brought up to me a couple of weeks ago by a friend who's a journalist. She asked if we'd ever named our car and what kind of car it was. She later wrote an article about it. We've had a couple of cars we've named. There was one in particular I remember. We owned this car back in the day when we were poor...I mean really poor. In fact, my in-laws gave us this car because we needed a second car and couldn't afford to buy one. It was a blue Toyota Corolla. It was a stick shift and what really made it unique is that it was missing most of the floorboard. Driving down the highway, seeing the road zipping by under my feet was not something I found comforting. We named this car "The Mullet." This was after the fish, not the hairdo, but now that I think about it either reference would probably be appropriate.

Now all this got me to thinking about a car my mom owned in the 70s. This car is infamous today because of it's exploding gas tank. Yep. The Ford Pinto. My mom was a single mother raising me and she bought this car because it was a good buy and because it was a gorgeous shade of yellow. I have a life's worth of memories from that little car. We lived in Louisiana and the fire ants loved that car almost as much as my mom did. Every morning she'd had to sweep out the mound they had built in it overnight. No matter how diligent she was in sweeping them out, a few still managed to stay behind and bite us. This car also took me through my first tornado. Now mind you, the funnel of the tornado never actually passed over the car, but it came close enough for the car to be rocked and pushed around as it roared by. Last but not least, the Pinto took it's last breath on the street corner next to a Texaco gas station. I was probably 6 years-old and we were stopped at the light at the corner. I was fascinated by the goings on out of my passenger window, where I sat without a seatbelt because those hadn't been invented yet. A huge crane was erecting a giant new Texaco sign on a towering poll above the gas station. The crane swung around to get in position to lift the sign up to where two men tethered to the poll waited to help guide the sign to it's final resting place. The crane operator gunned the engine and began backing up into the street--straight toward where we were waiting for the light to turn green. After a few choice words of indignation, my mother laid on the horn of the little yellow Pinto. The sound was lost over the engine sound of the big crane. My mother luckily realized that we had to get out and get out fast. She grabbed me by my left shoulder and pulled me as she exited the car. Loud popping and cracking noises filled my ears as we made our way across the street to safety. We turned around to see to crane now stopped on top of the Pinto and a flurry of people making their way to us. The Pinto, well let's just say it was a flat as a pancake under the weight of the crane. My mom's legs were scrapped and bleeding, but I was without a scratch. Who knows? Maybe that was a blessing in disguise. At least the gas tank never had the chance to explode.