Member-only story
How to tell a parts car from not a parts car
Which is which?
My father had an old white 1961 Thunderbird when I was a child. 1961 was my birth year, so he parked it in a friend’s barn intending to give it to me someday after I got my license. Years passed, the car forgotten. The barn where it was stored in Maine leaked, the paint peeled off the car and the frame rusted. By the time my father remembered the car, his dementia was in full gear. He sent me the keys and asked me to drive it where he lived in Tennessee.
My husband and I were living in Tucson at the time, where I was enrolled in an MFA Creative Writing Program, several thousand miles away. Doubtful, we flew to Maine that summer to get the car out of storage. It became clear that the car wouldn’t drive out of the barn. In fact it wasn’t driving anywhere — not for a long time, if ever. Considering the frame was rusted through, it was worth more for vintage parts than anything else.
My neighbors — the same people who had built a shed using pink and white interior doors with Christmas lights — had an automotive graveyard behind their house, obscured by an overgrown blackberry patch. The landlord who also lived in their camper…
