Most Americans have cars. We zip around town, run errands, cruise long stretches, go road tripping, get bogged down in traffic & maneuver around the neighborhood. Our cars are our babies. It doesn't matter if the car is a beater that can barely function or a swanky high-end souped-up speed demon. We love our cars, and I loved a little white 1988 Ford Escort Pony Hatchback.

I bought the pod car in 1994 when I finally got sick of my Buick Somerset. The latter lemon looked nice but had a chronic computer glitch which stalled the car if driven over five miles at a time. Yeesh! I needed something simple & reliable. The Escort had a sticker price of $3000. With the trade-in, I got my title, registration & tax for free. The Escort still cost me three grand.

The automatic four-cylinder hatchback never had a lot of pick up, but it got me where I wanted to go. It had about 30K miles when I got it, and twelve years later, it had flipped the century mark. I took that bitty car up mountains, across the country to Florida, & countless rides to work and play. There was maintenance on the Escort, usually something once a year. The water pump, the fuel filters, flat tires, this & that, but nothing too major.

For some reason, my little Escort was an easy & attractive target. Every time I got a decent stereo installed, I would eventually walk out to find a window smashed and suddenly without tunes. The worst one came when someone smashed the Escort's little sun roof in the rain to get the precious music maker inside. Sun roofs cost about three times as much as a side window to replace. I hope that crackhead got super high that day. Many months I went without a stereo, only to break down and tempt fate again & again. Finally, a coworker gave me a junker cassette AM/FM stereo & another buddy hooked it up for me. It didn't fit correctly in the case, but it worked. No one ever stole it. The cassette function finally failed which left me with just the radio. I despise radio advertisements, so I eventually settled into KUNM, the community/college radio station in town. Lots of free form music, NPR, classic, jazz & Native American slots. I go to work at 4:30 a.m. & it was sometimes surreal what would playing on overnight free form as I lurched toward the Yellow Cab Yard.

More than the music, the Escort was a basic & reliable little pod. No power steering, so I strengthened my forearms & learned how to aim through traffic. Although a tiny car, it was a hatchback, so I could haul a decent amount of junk in the back. Many trips to mountain bike trails, moved many a friend, and I even hauled dirt from Zuzax to a local theatre (don't ask).

After about ten years of use, I knew the Escort was getting up in the wear & tear category. I had stopped making out of town trips, and I didn't like going crosstown in the wee car. I bought an old cop car to cruise around and haul band gear in. They made a nice white car tandem. Long trips & band gigs were designated for the cruiser, and The Escort became my work commute & neighborhood errand car. If one car was low on gas, I'd use the other. I had to pay liability insurance on two vehicles, but having two cars came in handy on a few occasions.

As you have probably figured out, the Escort is no more. Three weeks ago, The Escort started shifting hard, particularly out of park or into reverse. I took it to the mechanic because I knew when my car was not sounding right. He fixed a cooling leak which calmed the shifting some but not completely. Two weeks ago, my car had its stroke. As I was coming home from a 12-hour cab day, my car thunked something serious at a stop sign on Ridgecrest & could no longer shift into any gear.

I enlisted the help of two of my band mates to push the car the last mile and a half to my house that night. We did well for 1/4 mile, but it was becoming clear that we wouldn't make it all the way home. Just then, a guy in a mini van offered to bump us all the way back to my house. I sat in the driver's seat & one of my guitarists sat in the passenger seat. KUNM was playing Cuban swing jazz, and you couldn't have picked a better soundtrack to push a dead car home. My guitarist said "This is a little surreal," and I told him that sort of thing happened to me every now and again. I offered the mini-van man a drink or compensation, but the Hispanic guy just smiled and waved it off. This town of Albuquerque can be all right if you let it be.

My mechanic came to my house a few days later and said something serious had broken in the transmission. I knew it was the end of the Escort. A couple days after that, I signed over the title & he loaded up my little white pod to go to the junkyard. "I don't know why Ford stopped making these little cars," my mechanic exclaimed. "They ran really well." I know. I know.

Most Americans have cars, and the 1988 Ford Escort Pony Hatchback was one of mine.

Chris Jungle will be a single car driver for a little while.