Well, it’s official. Brinestone’s car (which used to be mine) has gone to that big junkyard in the sky. Well, more like West Valley City, I guess, but that’s not the point. As Brinestone already said, we decided it wasn’t worth the money to fix it. Sinking a thousand dollars into would likely just buy us a couple more years until something else started to give out. So on Friday, we had a salvage yard come and tow it away.

Right after I bought it, I named it Dulcinea, not so much after the character in Don Quixote, which I haven’t read, as after one of my favorite albums, by Toad the Wet Sprocket. I never really called it Dulcinea—when I called it anything, it was usually just “The Cutlass”—but I felt like it should have a name anyway.

Dulcinea was the first decent car I owned (my previous cars being a rusty old station wagon with no A/C and a gutless old Buick Century that felt like it was going to give up the ghost at any moment), and it served me well for five years and over 40,000 miles. It was comfortable, it handled well and got decent gas mileage, and it looked pretty good considering its age, even though I was never a fan of the white exterior and red interior.

The last time I saw it, it was stranded at the parking lot of Jerry Seiner Salt Lake, unable to drive for more than five or ten minutes before stalling and refusing to restart until cooled off. I went after work on Thursday to make sure I’d gotten all our stuff out of it, including the stereo. No sense in wasting a perfectly good stereo. And then I drove home and didn’t see Dulcinea again. The tow truck came, gave Brinestone $150 for it, and that was that. It was surprisingly sad to realize that my car was gone.

Farewell, sweet Dulcinea. You were a good car whose time came too soon.