As you read this, I am likely sitting in the waiting area at the Mazda dealership hoping that whatever repair my car needs is minor and inexpensive. (Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I wrote and scheduled this yesterday.)

So, with cars on the brain, it occurred to me that most of the cars I’ve owned have been silver. I like silver, but I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite color or anything, it just happens to have worked out like that. Very few of my car purchases have been planned out things, where I could really take my time and pick out exactly what I wanted.

Here’s my current silver car, though I have to admit this isn’t a current picture, imagine it with a LOT more pollen on it:

How, I wound up with my silver Mazda CX-5 is a drunk driver totalled my silver Nissan Xterra. Don’t worry no one was injured in the crash. In fact, I was upstairs in my bed fast asleep when I felt the whole house shudder. At the time I lived in a four-unit rental house, and used to park my car on the street in front of the house. It should not have been a dangerous place to park. The road was wide, flat and straight. Greyhound buses and tractor trailers navigated that stretch of road daily with ease.

In the picture of my Mazda above, you can see the trunk of the giant sycamore tree on the neighbor’s property. When I was very young a large tree fell down and nearly crashed into our house. It took down some power lines and landed partly in our driveway. It was a dramatic experience that definitely left an impression on me, because I used to worry about the fact that someday that giant sycamore might fall on the house I lived in. So, when I woke at 1:30 in the morning after something rattled the entire house, I knew that it had finally happened. The sycamore tree had fallen. I jumped out of bed, and ran to the side window, only to see the big tree still standing. So, I went to the front window, and that’s when I saw my car shoved sideways in the middle of the road. I ran downstairs in my pajamas, threw on some rain boots that happened to be by the door and went to rescue my car.

A young guy staggered drunkenly out of a mangled Honda Civic that had come to rest at the end of the porch inches from my neighbor’s living room after taking out several posts supporting the porch roof. I got my car back to where it belonged, even though I could tell, if nothing else, the brakes were no longer working properly. My neighbor (a young woman in her 20s) and I ended up having to babysit the drunk guy while we waited forty minutes for the police to show up. What a night.

The next day Ron (who used to run an auto body shop) came over to see the damage and delivered the verdict that he didn’t think my car was going to be salvageable. Here I am saying goodbye to my silver Nissan:

Pictures can be deceiving. This car looked a lot worse from the back. Anyway, this happened shortly before Thanksving, leading to us driving all over Pennsylvania and New Jersey in a rental car with the world’s most uncomfortable seats in the days leading up to Thanksgiving at first trying to track down a used Xterra, and when that proved impossible settling on a pre-owned Mazda CX-5.

So, if you’re keeping score, that’s only two silver cars. Immediately preceding that silver Xterra, I owned a silver Jeep Cherokee. I’m sure somewhere I have a decent photo of that car, but all I could find was this flag made out of Jeeps, one of which happens to be my Cherokee:

Was I the sort of Jeep owner who went to gatherings of other Jeep owners? I was not, but I was a reporter for a local newspaper that got sent to cover various local events, and when I showed up to cover the local Jeep event they were short on vehicles for their giant American flag, and begged to borrow mine.

Eventually my silver Cherokee Sport started having serious engine problems. It was to the point that if I took my foot off the gas the car would stall out. This led to me having to shift into park at stop lights so that I could keep revving the engine. I didn’t have a lot of time to be choosy about cars. A family friend was a sales manager at a Nissan dealership, and they had a silver Xterra in inventory, so that’s how I wound up going from a silver Cherokee to silver Xterra.

Prior to the silver Cherokee, I owned a . . . silver Cherokee. Okay, technically that one was a Cherokee Wagoneer, because it was from 1986 and AMC hadn’t yet decided what they were calling the cars yet, but it looked like a Cherokee. Also technically that one had a two-tone paint job in silver and charcoal gray:

Anyway I got my original silver car after my previous car (it was purple) was totalled after getting rear-ended by a Dodge Durango. That car was a Neon, and the car in front of me was a Jeep Cherokee. It was a relatively low speed crash, but seeing what happened to my little car I decided it would be in my best interest to drive something SUV-sized. Thus began my silver SUV odyssey.

I don’t know what color my next car will be, but here’s hoping I don’t need to worry about that anytime soon. I mean, unless I get extraordinarily lucky and win a car in a sweepstakes or something!

— Alissa

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Weekly Inspiration

What I’m Reading: The Commfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl

What I’m Watching: Air

What I’m Listening to: “Fast Car” Tracy Chapman

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Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com

Find out more about my digital art at alissacarin.com

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My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.