The Neon returned to the East Coast strapped to a front-end tow dolley behind a 24' GMC TopKick box truck I rented from Ryder. I think I've already told the moving truck story somewhere on this site, so I won't rehash it all here, but the short version is that it was terrible—grievously underpowered, completely unequipped, with about 30 degrees of play in the steering and the slushiest automatic transmission that could be devised by human technology. At one point early in the trip, my father set the brakes on fire—literally on fire, it was shooting out through the wheel rims with a sound like a blowtorch—riding them on the way down the Sierras, because the truck had no compression braking to speak of. Somehow, though, everything survived the trip, including the car.

The rest of the Neon's career with me was less eventful. Only two misfortunes of note befell it:

- I was on my way home from work at UltraNet in Marlborough one night, bombing along the Masspike, when the cylinder head gasket failed. When I took it to the nearest Dodge dealer the next day, I expected them to say it would cost more to fix than the car was worth—it was well off warranty by then—but to my surprise, Chrysler paid for the repair. From what the service department guy told me, that was something that happened to a lot of first-generation Neons at around that mileage, and the company decided to just fix them as they came up and not make a fuss.

- Once when I worked at GTE, I got sent to an offsite training in a hotel that had a parking garage. Once again, while the car was sitting somewhere minding its own business, someone bumped into it. No big deal, bent up one of the rear fenders and the corner of the decklid, but that was another couple of weeks in traction. The insurance company must have been bemused. How many people get the same car banged up on both coasts within a couple of years?

So, as we can see, most of my Neon's problems didn't stem from its build quality, apart from the head gasket thing. The only persistent quality-related problem it had was the air conditioning, which had a hose in it that liked to fail every couple of summers and let out all the Freon. That's what happened in Albuquerque, and it happened at least twice more while I had the car.

I'd had the Neon for five years, long enough for it to start showing its age, when my mother—you may detect a pattern here—asked me if it was for sale.

"Maybe," I said. "Why?"

She explained that her husband, who was still teaching high school English at the time, had a student who would be going away to college soon and needed a car. I seem to recall I was was vaguely familiar with the kid from somewhere or other, and he seemed all right. Besides, though the Neon had served me well, I was starting to get a hankering for something a little larger, so the next time I visited the old homestead (I still lived and worked in MA at the time), I sold it to him and bought another car while I was in town.

Actually, I bought two other cars while I was in town, but that's another story.

Alas, the Neon too came to a sad end, albeit not one inflicted on it by humans. During ice-out the following spring, if memory serves, the Kennebec River overflowed its banks and flooded, among other things, one of the student parking lots at Colby College. When the waters receded, my old Neon was among the dead.

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep:
O, hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea!

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.