Herbert with Bits of Vernon

Carmen and Julia were grinning conspiratorially as I walked in. I knew that look well enough to be instantly suspicious: Two decades of parenthood create that instinct. You can be at a friend’s house, and somehow, your grown child will make you have to play the Dad role again. But even two decades of parenthood didn’t prepare me for the announcement I got from my daughter.

“I backed Herbert into a street sign,” she said.

She didn’t seem upset, worried, or even proud that her car (by which I mean, of course, the car registered to and insured by me) had collided with street furniture. She seemed, if anything, amused. The same applied to Carmen, who was closer to my age than hers, and who had been her babysitter some fifteen years earlier. But Carmen was off the hook, His babysitting days were long over and he was now a co-conspirator. No, I was the father of college-age woman, and was being called upon once again to play Dad to my little girl.

“Show me,” I sighed, more bemused than irritated.

She took me outside and across the street, barely suppressing a giggle. She pointed into the long grass and stood back to give me a better view. There was a concrete footing with the rusted stub of a metal pole sticking half an inch out of it. And next to it, lying in the grass, was seven feet of metal pole with one rusty end. In the weeds, I read the legend Speed 25 Limit.

“Show me the car,” I sighed, still trying to maintain a facade of stern detachment, but allowing a little amusement to creep in.

She walked me to Carmen’s driveway, where she had parked Herbert, and once again stood back to give me a clear view.

“I thought you said you’d backed into that sign,”

“I did!”

And when I passed my hand across the apparently unscathed rear fender, I did indeed feel a slight scratch about halfway across.

That’s why I bought a Volvo 240 for my daughter. They are boxy looking tanks that will win in any altercation with other cars, or even street signs. Everyone seems to yield to you on the road because a Volvo 240 gives off a “don’t mess with me” vibe. In its old-fashioned rectangular way, it telegraphs the message: “Keep your distance, lesser vehicles. If we collide, I won’t feel a thing, but you’ll be out of commission for a week and cost two thousand dollars to fix.”

Like every car that’s more than 20 years old, Volvo 240s are cheap to buy and cheap to insure. As long as you don’t go to a Volvo dealership, they really aren’t that expensive to service either. And they keep on running for hundreds of thousands of miles.

Herbert is my second Volvo 240 (which is to say, my daughter’s second Volvo 240). Vernon was our first. Vernon was a 1986 240DL with no radio that I salvaged from a family member, who had crashed it and didn’t have the money for repairs. It only cost about $700 to get him roadworthy, and that Christmas, the Christmas after my daughter turned 16, I gave her her first car. She posed for a photograph that Christmas morning, sitting on his hood with a big grin on her face. She was smiling with pleasure and pride of ownership, but also because I’d just told her the trunk had so much room she could hide a couple of dead bodies in it.

Vernon was the color and shape of a stick of butter, and he ran more for three more years, until, at the grand old age of 28 with 343,000 miles on the clock, his exhaust system rusted out and fell apart. For two weeks, I managed to hold the 12-foot exhaust system in place with coat hangers, bailing wire, and prayer, while I scoured Craigslist for a replacement. And that’s where I found Herbert. A newer 1991 model with a working radio and a hand-cranked sunroof, Herbert sounded like the height of luxury. It was snowing heavily when I went to visit Herbert for the first time, and with a three-inch layer of snow on him, he looked glorious. Boxy, rectangular, and with a large square of cleared snow in the top to show off the freshly hand-retracted sunroof. I was instantly in love, and plunked down $800 in cash, ready to deliver another Swedish-built Christmas present to my then college-freshman daughter.

Herbert was missing a few bits here and there. But luckily, Vernon had plenty to spare. I spent another week prying off Jesus bars, switching out light bulbs and covers, and creating a hybrid creature, Herbert with Bits of Vernon, ready to present on Christmas eve.

That all happened three years ago. Julia drives a Prius now, and poor Herbert has been relegated to the role of Dad’s weekend pleasure drive. There’s no shame in that, of course. If you’ve never driven a Volvo 240 from 1991, you don’t know what you’re missing: There’s something about being behind the wheel of a vehicle from the last century, with the sunroof cranked open and the wind in your hair, that makes you feel like a million bucks. It’s easy to overlook the flaking clear coat on his hood, because in all other ways, he’s in great shape. He doesn’t have rust, which is rare for a car of his age. He starts without complaint, even in cold weather, which is more than his owner can boast. He’s the proud bearer of Pennsylvania Classic Car plates, so, while he needs to be inspected annually, he doesn’t need to go through emissions tests. He costs only a couple of hundred dollars to add to my insurance policy. And with a mere 249,000 miles on the clock, I estimate he’s got a lot more life in him yet. He may be big rectangular tank of a car, but he’s surprisingly nimble.

But somehow, I sense that Herbert craves something a little more than what he’s getting now, and he deserves it too. He needs someone who cares enough to replace the cloudy red cover on the rear left brake light. He needs someone to take off the last of that flaking clear coat and give him a nice paint job. At very least, he deserves someone who’ll pose cross-legged on his hood with a big smile, thinking of a trunk so big that it will fit two dead bodies, and a rear fender that has taken on a street sign and won.