My parents were recently visiting us, and one night over dinner we began reminiscing about my old car. It was a first-year Saturn, acquired back when everyone was frothing at the mouth to "buy American" and Saturns were so rare that every time you passed another Saturn on the road you seriously felt compelled to swap thumbs-up honks and waves to acknowledge your shared membership in the elite club of Saturn owners. For a couple of years after I bought the car people would actually ask me in parking lots if I had gone to Tennesse for the annual Homecoming party yet.

I loved it to death, even though I drove it into the ground by treating the oil light like a gas light ("Oh, better get around to refilling that oil thing-y next time I'm by a station!"). I spent my entire first year of college ferrying friends and friends of friends back and forth from the airport, Wal-mart, the grocery store, what have you, because I enjoyed driving it just that much. My fares and I named it the S. S. Stealth Saturn with the S. S. standing for "Stealth Saturn" because we didn't know what S. S. was supposed to stand for.

I had a few fender benders that didn't so much bend the fender as scuff its plastic, but no major accidents. The worst thing to happen to the car (aside from the whole "oil is optional" fiasco) was probably the time I was backing out of my parents' garage and took the side mirror off with the back of their house (in my defense, you had to kind of swerve to miss the house, and I was late for work and apparently had no time for swerving). Going in to get the mirror fixed was like the third time I'd been to the Saturn dealership in two weeks (once for a checkup, and then there was some problem with the tires), and as I pulled in with my mirror hanging down by one wire the mechanic was actually shaking his head and going "rampy, rampy, rampy" at me.

So over dinner my dad was telling mr rampy the story of how we bought the car in the first place, trying to make the point of how he hates having to haggle over things. I remember sitting at the desk while we finalized the deal and my parents deciding which extras to get (tape deck�Woo hoo!). At this time safety features like ABS and air bags were like totally optional, and they were debating whether or not to get a steering wheel air bag.

Dad: That's quite expensive.

Mom: Would you rather pay to reconstruct her pretty face?

In the end we decided to get the (one) air bag, and I spent the rest of my time with the car warning passenger-side peeps to dig in the glove compartment for and quickly inflate a Ziplock bag if it looked like we were about to impact any large objects.

So about a year ago the Saturn reached the point where it just wasn't worth it to pay any more money to fix it (i.e. the engine was pretty much shot after ten years of being parched for oil). As I was driving home from the garage, already mentally divesting myself of the car, I realized that not once had I ever needed to have the air bag deploy.

And then I spent the rest of the drive home fighting an urge to gently plow into a tree just to get my dad's money's worth.