It’s a never ending battle of making your cars better and also trying to be better yourself.
Dale Earnhardt
Pouring rain and dark outside. Extreme rainfall warning 50-75 mm.
I thought about what to write as I walked past Gracie, my old van. I looked at the rusted out front fender and thought, ya I should have fixed that way back when the rust was tiny.
The day I brought her home. She was a gift from an online date as long as I promised to take her away.
Back then all the doors worked, the grill, headlight door and taillight were not held together with gorilla tape. The back hatch even latched. But back then, she was guzzling gas at a horrible rate. Later I would spend three days on a damaged back to repair that problem.
Later the muffler would fall off, and I thought I would pick it up on the way home twenty minutes later. It was already gone some idiot that it was a catalytic converter worth something. He did me a favor. I would pick up a thrush glass pack muffler, spend more time on a damaged back to put it in. Noisy as hell, but since then, my neighbour stopped revving his truck up as he passed by my house at 2 in the morning. I guess he realized Gracie was louder and capable of keeping him up in the middle of the night.
I would go on to use Grace for pushing an old parts pick up around the yard not realizing I had broken and bent most of the front end trim. Parts you can’t buy anymore. Funny, I can buy every part for my 1955 Chev pickup, but not my 1992 Van.
My poor old Gracie is like me bent and broken, a little rusted but still gets me into town to pick up freight and food. I love the old girl. I wouldn’t trade her in for a Vette.
SInce I got her the drivers side door handle is broken, the sliding door and rear hatch don’t latch. The sliding door is held in with a strap during driving. The rear hatch sort of seals from the weather. You have to leave the front drivers window open to get back in.
Besides that she gets great gas mileage now and I will have to figure out what those red dash light are and the headlights they stopped working a while ago. One took a rock dead center. So did the windshield.
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