1986 Honda Civic

After cruising around the country quite a bit in my Econoline van, I started looking for something a little more subclassic to drive. I found this little Honda stashed away, broken down behind my mother's garage. My little sister had driven it and it had only seemed to cause her problems. I had always asserted that I knew nothing about Honda's and could do absolutely nothing for her. So I fixed the vacuum leak or whatever the "problem" was (I don't remember now, but I remember that it was no big deal at all), and drove it for a couple of years.

Once a front suspension part broke free when I was pulling off of a curvy mountain highway to check a map and I was stuck in Asheville North Carolina for a couple days waiting for the part. Another time I blew a valve on the road, altered my course several hundred miles and stopped by my sister's and picked up the Nissan you see in the background of the photo to finish my trip. After I replaced the head, the car leaked oil something awful but that was resolved by a Chevy Z71 truck running a red light at about 80 mph.

I remember seeing the grill of my mother's truck (she also drove a Chevy truck) in the passenger seat next to me and thinking it to be a very curious site. Then I had a few more visions that can best be understood as "life flashing before your eyes" and then I had an amazing sense of relief come over me. But that relief was short lived as next I found myself, though bloody and traumatized, relatively unharmed in a crumpled piece of metal on a stretch of road that I wasn't on just seconds earlier with a crowd of alarmed bystanders standing by acting alarmed. In calm reasonable tones, I quieted the crowd down and informed them that although I would very much like to try to get up out of the car, that I did seem to be bleeding quite a bit and I thought it best in a situation like this to stay still and wait for emergency personal who, I was sure would be arriving shortly to extract me and strap me to a nice solid board for transport.

And so that was the end of that car and of my career delivering pizzas.