Good Riddance: A Goodbye to a Good Ride

A hurricane, puppy puke, and the end of the road for our beloved family car.

Aly thought the original photo I was going to use of our old Toyota Highlander was too boring, so she made this.

The fall of 2012 was one of the best times of my life, but it was also one of the worst for my beloved city of New York. I got married to my current husband, David, in early October; a few weeks later Hurricane Sandy decimated huge parts of the Northeast with massive flooding and tropical storm winds reaching 150 mph that ripped homes from the ground and blew out much of Manhattan’s power grid.

One of the many things destroyed by the hurricane was our car, a GMC Acadia. The night of the storm, a neighbor took a video of it floating—yes, floating—down two full city blocks of our Brooklyn neighborhood. (I searched my old hard drives for this video but couldn’t find it, though I did find a picture from when we found the car the next day and a video of the flooded street that destroyed it the night before.) When the swell of the water from the East River finally pulled back and the streets dried up, the damage was horrific. Among the wreckage was our car, filled with river water and sitting in the middle of the road. Inside, the flowers from our wedding I’d planned to preserve and had left in the trunk to dry out were floating like a dead fish in its tank.

A video from the night of the hurricane and the very beginning of the massive swell that would see entire neighborhoods of Brooklyn (and our car) completely engulfed in water.

Our car the morning after Hurricane Sandy. This street in Brooklyn had been completely flooded causing the car to float up two full blocks from its original parking space and land here, in the middle of the street.

But today’s Good Riddance is not about that GMC Acadia, which we’ve long since said our goodbyes to—it’s about the car that came after it, a silver Toyota Highlander. This car has been through a lot with our family over the years. It drove us through hail storms and kept us safe as we steadily slid across icy roads. (You know how I feel about icy roads!) It took me to get an abortion. It drove me, David, and the precious cargo of our baby daughter back from the hospital after she was born. It drove us to Georgia to visit family during the days of the pandemic when flying still felt too risky. It has transported us and our friends and family to weddings, memorials, weekend getaways, and music festivals along the way.

This past week we got rid of our Toyota Highlander after over a decade together. In recent years, a lot has started to go wrong with it, not to mention a few odious smells that at some point became permanent additions to the car. (One of the many trips we took in that car was to bring home our new eight-week-old puppy who promptly puked all her kibble up in the backseat, a smell that has haunted the vehicle ever since, no matter how much we deep cleaned it.)

This week I’m saying goodbye to our beloved family car, and good riddance to all the smells and stains that have accumulated in it over all these years. (Cue my daughter pinching her nose every time she got into her booster seat, saying dramatically, “I REFUSE to breathe in here!”)

What are you saying goodbye to or letting go of this week?