The car is a 1988 Volvo and my wife recently went from suggesting I sell it to demanding I do so.

My neighbor, an eccentric and eclectic man, who raises pigeons in his backyard and yet hunts pheasants and dove and quail and turkeys and other assorted birds, does not disagree with my wife. 

"You think I should sell it?"  I asked him one afternoon as he was spray-painting his truck's gun rack in his driveway.

"Yes," he said. "You should sell it."

He has a bumper sticker on his truck reading:  "Fear the government that fears guns."

I asked my wife once, after reading the bumper sticker, "Does that mean we should fear a government that doesn't have an army or weapons or something like that?

"Are you serious with that question?"  She asked me.

"I guess I was at first, but probably not now."

"C'mon, now, please. You got to be joking on that." 

The Volvo is heading towards 200,000 miles and was once burgundy-red in color.  The exterior is aging badly and rusting at an awkward, confused pace making it look like a Jackson Pollack painting.

In a twist of ironic weirdness as far as car sale mythology goes, the only person who answered the newspaper ad was a 55-year old minister who needed a reliable car to get him to and from church on Sundays.

"Is it reliable enough to get me to and from church every week?" The minister asked, not looking at me.

The car had taken me to Alaska, Canada, Mexico, Florida, Arizona, California, Nebraska, Iowa, Utah, Washington, New York City and hundreds of places in between. It had been ticketed for drag-racing and had been to repair shops after being damaged four-wheeling.  It tried to chase down the limousine carrying Red Auerbach and his cigar after an NBA All-Star game when he refused to acknowledge my, "Hey, Red, how's it going, bra?"  The Volvo drove me to Joe Montana's retirement party at San Francisco's Embarcadero Square and to a basketball tournament at Rucker Park in Harlem, but never once had it taken me to a church anywhere.

"I really have no idea," I answered the minister. 

The day before the minister arrived I cleaned the car out and found a ticket from the 1995 Colorado-Oklahoma football game.  My friend Deke and I drove to Norman for the game and watched Colorado beat Oklahoma. The Sooner Schooner tipped over right before halftime and Deke was slugged in the back of the head before the game by Oklahoma quarterback Cale Gundy's aunt for loudly questioning Gundy's gender while in the pocket.  It was an eye-watering punch that brought him to a knee. He recovered, got to his feet, apologized to her and bought her a cold drink.  That's the way to do it down there.

Unable to get tickets together, we used walkie-talkies as a communication device throughout the game.  Deke purchased a yellow windbreaker and a blue baseball hat the day before at a sporting goods store and managed to get down on the Colorado sideline pretending to be game security. He radioed me, told me where he was, which was directly behind coach Bill McCartney, and waved to me at the same time the real security was escorting him away from the sidelines and off to jail.

While waiting for Deke to be processed and released later that evening, I sat on a barstool next to Barry Switzer drinking Coors.  Switzer was fired a couple of years earlier for running an outlaw program.  He was anything but an outlaw that evening, talking to me for several hours about the best fishing spots in the Southeast.  I have never been fishing, but am an avid reader of fishing magazines and had a few things to say back to Barry, like, "fish flop around for awhile on the shore after you catch them before they die for good."  I consider him a friend after that night, even though he wouldn't remember me if we passed on the street.  

A couple of years earlier, Deke and I drove the Volvo to Miami for the Orange Bowl.  We didn't have enough money for immediate accommodations having run our credit cards to the limit making t-shirts for the Orange Bowl game and had just enough cash to get us back to Colorado.

"We'll make enough off t-shirt sales to live at a South Beach hotel for months," I told Deke.

"I want to drink multi-colored drinks out of big glasses with stir-sticks, too," Deke said, always the Zen optimist.

Deke is generous with his wisdom.  He has told me important things like, "Don't throw the bottle out of the window in front of the cops." And, "Don't be in a hurry unless you need to get somewhere really fast."  And, "Don't climb big fences to get something that isn't yours. If the wire doesn't get you, the dogs will." And, "Don't take a lot of hits of LSD on Fat Tuesday." 

Four hours into our Miami stay and about 32 minutes into selling our t-shirts, we were busted by an Orange Bowl representative claiming the shirts were not properly licensed by the universities or the Orange Bowl.  We plead ignorance, because we were ignorant about the recent t-shirt legislation.

After the shirts were confiscated, we had $267 in cash and no credit.  We slept in the car for three nights and hung out in Miami during the days.  The Orange Bowl is a game you don't miss when you're in Miami on January 1^st and have tickets. We were unshowered and gamey for the game, but this was humid Miami. Everyone has their game face on and their gamey bodies on. 

A newspaper columnist made the mistake of critiquing our hero, John Elway, too often. We found out where he lived and drove by his house to do something to make him understand our position, and saw him laying sod down at his new house.  Later, eight of us crammed into the Volvo, and in the middle of the night, quiet and effective like mute landscape laborers; we rolled the sod up and put it back on the pallets. 

The Volvo took me and three buddies to Tempe for an Arizona State-Nebraska football game.  On the way down we purchased 3 cases of beer and put them in the trunk of the car.  Driving through the desert in 100 degree heat without air conditioning, we started hearing popping sounds coming from the car trunk. 

At first we thought they were gunshots, but when we pulled over we found the desert heat was causing the beer cans to explode.  Not wanting to lose our investment, we began drinking as many beers as fast as we could.  Being more than a few sheets to the wind, probably a mid-sized laundry to a gale, we took off and a few miles down the road, drinking, weaving, and listening to a Guns & Roses CD, Deke, with his arm hanging out of the window slammed it into a mile-marker. 

We found a chain-smoking rural doctor who set the broken arm and asked us, "So let me get this straight. You were arm-wrestling to see who drove the next leg of the trip?" 

"Something like that," I answered for Deke, knowing that it is always better to lie and maybe get away with it, then it is to tell the truth and face an immediate consequence.

After the Arizona trip, we solved the exploding beer can problem by drilling a hole into the back seat of the Volvo to the trunk so we could carry a keg in the trunk and run the tap through the hole and into the back seat. 

There was a night driving down a highway from Colorado Springs to Denver with my buddies in a blizzard after watching a friend play goalie for the Colorado College hockey team. We were drinking beer from the trunk-keg when the Volvo was stopped by a cop. 

"How fast do you think you were going?"  He asked me, the designated driver at 1:55 AM with a .18 BAC.

"I don't know...70, 75." 

"14" 

He made each of us get out of the car and stood facing us jingling coins in his pocket.  He then threw the coins from his pocket and into the snow.

"Whoever can come closest to telling me how much change I threw out is driving."

This same goalie, after his first year at Colorado College, asked me to keep his goalie pads in the trunk while he spent some time with his new girlfriend. They had a lot of catching up to do, because I didn't see him the entire summer.

That August, at a drive-in movie theater, his pads combusted and caught on fire.  When the police arrived after the pads were extinguished, the investigating officer told me, "I have a couple of questions for you." 

"Will you be expecting good answers?" I asked. 

There was the time on my way back to Colorado after my grandma's funeral I stopped in the town of Alta, Iowa, population 1,865. Curious as to why 1,865 people would live there, I exited the highway and lost the alternator belt on the main street. I pulled into a gas station and asked the owner when he could fix the Volvo.

"Tomorrow.  Tonight is the sectional basketball finals. Alta and Aurelia. They're big, but we're better. Get in the truck."

I think every town member was at the game, and for these people, it was like Game 7 of the NBA Finals. I locked away my cynicism and witnessed a good game of basketball played at Iowa's lowest high school classification.

Afterward, I ate pot-luck dinner with the fans and the players and the coaches. I never knew you could use Jell-O to make so many different dishes.

I looked at the minister as these thoughts ran through my head and then I looked at the car that had brought so much life to my life.

"You're really going to take this car to church and back every Sunday?"
"Yeah, and maybe do some church-related errands."

I thought about the time me and Deke drove the Volvo to Mexico to see a bullfight. We committed felonies, probably, and compromised an international treaty or two, maybe.  All I really remember is we never found the bullfight and the car smelled like a reggae concert for three months afterward.

"I'm sorry.  This isn't the car for you."

I made the decision without talking to my wife. I know communication is the key to a successful relationship, but there is a clause in the vows about for better or for worse. I don't think keeping the car qualifies as a for worse. At least not just yet.