It's approaching seven o'clock in the morning on New York Avenue here in Nashville, Tennessee. Good morning.
In around two hours, a tow truck will pull up to my house and a dear companion of 12 years and I will part ways. Goodbye, Huey. I hope you can bring some income to my favorite NPR radio station, 89.5 WMOT Roots Radio! You have aged well, though mechanical and cosmetic issues abound, and you have been a reliable friend. Bon Voyage.
Later:
Later Later:
Watson and I took a very short walk before the truck arrived--it's right at 82 degrees and I wanted to get out there before the sun rose high enough to steam us edible in the near 100 percent humidity. Watson clearly agreed, since the duration of the walk was 12 minutes and we literally travelled one block. Back at home, I took a leap into the past.
I popped onto my laptop and visited Google Photos online, looking for pics of Huey. I found a bunch. I will now spend a bit of time curating some of these to celebrate a long relationship and its passing into memory. So.
In August 2010, we needed a new car. The old Mercury Villager van had outlived its usefulness and we could look down the road to a time when both grown kids would be out of the house. As we'd done before, we started at Carmax. I'm a fan, even if my last two cars were bought from dealerships. After assessing the condition of the Villager, they offered us $500 in trade. I thought I could do better than that selling it and began doing some research. That led me to the CARS Program, an Obama administration effort to stimulate economic growth by pulling new light car sales "...forward from a far more distant future, and thus represented an important increment to aggregate demand at just the time when such demand was sorely needed." Read more about CARS, commonly referred to as "Cash for Clunkers."
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I was zeroing in on a Smart Car. Why? I really don't remember, though its unique appearance and fuel economy were attractive. We drove out to Cool Springs to the Mercedes dealership and I test drove a red Smart ForTwo Passion Coupe. I LOVED it immediately. After discovering the CARS program would provide us a subsidy payment of 4500 dollars for the Villager, I signed all the dotted lines and drove away with Huey, whom, I recall, received his name on the way home.
Why Huey? Easy.
image from https://paramountcartoons.fandom.com/wiki/Baby_Huey
Baby Huey
My Huey looked nothing like the 50s era cartoon giant baby duckling, but I remembered Baby Huey fondly and cheerfully, and I knew that I had chosen to name him appropriately the first time I drove him around Nashville. Seriously, people on the street would smile, often laugh, and sometimes point at us as we cruised through traffic. I thought of him as my "smile making machine." I quickly fell further in love with that aspect of my new buddy. Later on, as my son would ride with me, Colin would see pedestrians or bus stop folks and reach into the glove compartment were I stored two foam red clown noses, and ask, "Dad, should we nose 'em?" We often did.
I never took Huey on a road trip, though he never put me in a position to use roadside service. He had no spare tire, you see; and because the tires were two unusual sizes and not readily available on the road, I never roamed past, say, Ashland City or Marrowbone Lake, or to my former job down off Nolensville Road. In the just under 12 years we were together, he and I racked up only 106,773 miles. Okay, that's still a lot of miles together.
I used to talk to him, sometimes petting the little hump over the radio/CD player console as I did. It's okay. I talk to my dead brother and to both parents, though both of them are in the ground (on opposite sides of Thompson Lane in Woodmont Cemetery). With these last, it's a good way to work stuff out without paying a therapist. With Huey, it was just companionship, aided and abetted by a stiff dose of anthropomorphism.
I want to thank Chet and Mike at EurWerks garage, and the lovely Melis, for being my go-to Huey maintenance team for nearly a decade. I want to thank Huey, with the hope that he will bring supporting income to WMOT either by resale or sale for parts. I want to thank you for reading this foolishness.
Now to take a ride in Casper, my 2022 Kia Soul. I think we have a long ride in front of us!
