Mom's Old Minivan

When I was a little kid, my mom had an old Plymouth minivan. It was
junky in just about every way possible. For starters it looked bad. The model was not too good looking, while this one also had faded paint that in some places ceased to exist. The whole hood and most of the roof had absolutely no paint, and left behind the light gray primer. If you are a person who is easily entertained, you would have a lot of fun with the hood, because you could easily pick off the leftover paint. It was completely box shaped. It was almost all right angles. Anything aerodynamic, had nothing to do with this van. For some strange reason, the interior designer decided to make the seats a conversion of leather and cloth. The back of the seats and the armrest were leather, while the actual seat cushions were cloth. The van as a whole was visually painful.
With a car that ugly you would hope that it was comfortable, but, it
wasn’t. Most of the time the air-conditioning didn’t work, and with the Georgia summer heat, riding in that van could be pretty nauseating. Those leather armrests also split on a bunch of spots, so then they would scratch you if you put any weight on them. Being that we spilled drinks on the armrests as well, that made them uncomfortably sticky. In fact we had spilled things on just about the entire inside of the car, which made most of it pretty sticky. The seat cushions were so smashed that they were no longer anywhere near comfortable. In the back seats you could feel metal bars beneath the cushions. Sitting on the carpet in the trunk was actually more comfortable than the back seats, and yes on a few occasions I snuck into the trunk as my mom was driving. Then there was the sliding door. Boy was that thing fun. Before closing that door you should have had to sign a form stating that, “all damage done to your shoulder is your own fault.” I wasn’t able to close that door for myself until I was seven years old.
The thing didn’t sound too great either. First of all it was a bit too loud for
a minivan. Then, the sounds that it did produce were bad ones. It sounded like someone had dumped gravel into all of the important parts. The muffler didn’t work too well. This gave it the sound of a continuous belch. The seats made a lot of noise too. They creaked every time anyone moved. Then there was that sliding door again. If you were able to close it, it could diffidently wake neighbors. It was the loud sound of scraping metal that was not very kind to ears.
After all of those unfortunate factors, strangely enough, it didn’t smell that
bad. The smell was an interesting collaboration of the burgers, fries, burritos, and all other drive-through foods that we had eaten in that van, mixed with all of the soft drinks we had spilled on the floor and seats. There was a bad side to the way it smelled though. We had lost a lot of crayons into and beneath the seats, and crayons happen to be one of my least favorite smells. Something about them just makes me gag. I was a colored pencils only kid. Most of the time, you could focus on the drive-through smell instead of the crayon smell. This made the van smell very unique. It was the kind of smell that made you feel comfortable, but also the kind of smell that made you think that you might get clogged arteries or have a heart attack just from breathing the drive-through air pollution.
My dad always had a rule for our family, “don’t get a new car until the one you have breaks”. Thank God, it finally did break. My mom did get a new van, and although new vehicles do cost money, having a replacement for the old one was an overall relief. It’s been about seven years since them. We gave it to a guy who takes cars and sells their pieces. Now people all over northeast Georgia gets to experience my mom’s van, one piece at a time.