Feeling: the vehicle love
Listening to: Cranberries - Ode to My Family
Reading/Watching: Smallville and Everwood

My car has several different nicknames, and will probably continue to develop several more derivations of the names I've given her.

Her full name is Luna Lapereau (Moon Bunny), but she hasn't used that name since her weird mom picked it out. She became just Luna very quickly, and Looney when she was acting strange. On days when I had passengers in the backseat, she was Luna Bunny: Bounciest Nissan in the West. When she was trying very, very hard for me, she wore her superhero Bunnygirl mask, and when I was feeling just silly, she was Luna ba Duna. This is mostly because I've had her for almost four years, and it's been ample time for us to bond. I know her pretty well by now. Mon coeur even remarked on how the two of us girls have a lot in common.

No matter how much you dress us up, polish and primp and pay for expensive washes, we both stay cute and shiny for about fifteen seconds, and then the hair starts to frizz, or a bug with a fantastic amount of yellow guts splats squarely in the middle of the windshield. But despite being a little mussed at all times, we never, ever smell. And the insides stay clean.

We're both constantly having some scrape or ding of some kind, although mine are cheaper to repair (for the most part: consider last March's surprise cystectomy). She has a trick hip: a passenger-side rear quarter panel that has been banged up three times in a row, and replaced once. Well, I have knees that used to pop all over the place (although they're quieter now, post-weight-loss). She loses hubcaps like I lose earrings, and doesn't seem to mind (or notice) when she's only wearing three, instead of four. Luna just can't avoid bruises, no matter how hard she tries, and neither can I. Every once in a while I'll notice a small scratch, a door ding, a bloody mosquito bite or a yellowed knee bruise, and say, "When did that get there?" Plus, her paint job, like my hair, is expensive as hell to maintain, and the first thing to get messed up (hence why it's often left alone to do its thing).

But the most remarkable thing is the way she tries. My Looney girl is not the most high-octane of cars. My girl is not the youngest, or the flashiest, and she hates getting up in cold weather, because her steering column creaks. But if you ask her to, she will try. She's almost eight years old, but she's game for anything, even the last time we went driving through the hill country and she had an acceleration race in a climbing lane with an 18-wheeler and lost (for the first time, which broke her heart). I later found out it might have been because I haven't changed her transmission fluid in about forever, and she just didn't have the caffiene in her blood. Next time will be different.

My girl has taken me to 127,000 miles (although I started with her at 70,000- I was not her first relationship), and now that she's getting to that time when I can count the years on one hand before she'll go to the big pick-n-pull in the sky, I'm finding it hard to imagine letting her go. She got me through college, although she still complains about the Schoolville traffic by humming angrily when someone cuts her off. She loves squeezing into the parking space next to the gigantic FordChevyDodge 35000000 (which is always slewed over the line because its owner can't park worth a damn), simply because she's tiny and she can (although she's fond of snuggling up on the truck's driver side so he can't open his door, just to be considerate to her neighbors).

When I got my oil and transmission fluid changed, the mechanic patted Luna on the nose and said, "Y'know, these are good little cars. They stick with you."

I grinned and agreed. "I've put my girl through a lot, but she's never given up on me." Right now, when I'm hovering on the funny side of broke, it means a lot that she's still alive and kicking. And since I write about all my other friends on here, I thought I'd mention Luna Bunny. She's stuck around the longest.

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