In Memorium, Mini

Originally published on Medium in 2018

January 12th, 2013.

If you’re not familiar, january in Calgary Canada is a dark, cold affair.

The sun sets before 5 pm, and is low on the horizon well before you leave work. It’s frosty and the ground is covered in old snow — not even the fresh white christmas snows of november and december. January snow is crusted dirt that piles up everywhere, plowed and sanded and plowed again.

And I had just bought a car.

It’s funny, in hindsight, how it came to be. I didn’t even really mean to.my very first car, a 1988 Nissan Pulsar NX

This Pulsar was my first car. We grew up as kids in that back seat. I learned to drive in it when I was 14, I bought it outright when I was 16 from my parents, who had had it since they were first married and it was brand new. That car was — and still is — deeply ingrained in my psyche.

So it’s sort of weird, actually, that one day I simply… fell in love with something else.

There wasn’t much lead up to the decision. I didn’t explicitly think that I needed a new car. I didn’t really save up money or have aspiration car posters on my wall or anything. One day I was on Kijiji (Canadian Craigslist) and there was a post for a Mini Cooper, a car I hadn’t really thought much about.

The price was $11,500 but that very weekend it went down to $10,500. Maybe that felt like a sign. It went down slightly more even the day of.

I went on a wednesday, the 9th. The Mini dealership at that time was a ways up in the corner of town and it was january which meant that going after work was inherently night time, even around supper.

This was the first time I ever drove into a car dealership. I didn’t really know anything about them, or the process, or who to see or what to say. I asked about the car in the Kijiji ad, the grey one. It was parked out front, cold and silent in the row of brothers. A salesman gave me a glance and played along, grabbing the keys and his jacket.

I sat in the drivers seat. Frozen leather. My Pulsar’s seats were cloth, and that whole car was practical but plain. I loved her, don’t get me wrong, all 75 horsepower of her, but this was 100 more. It was supercharged.

The big gauge in the middle, the elegant orange glow. The huge sunroof. It was dark and we couldn’t even move the car, but I scheduled a drive for that saturday.

I spent those three days pacing. Checking the listing, to see if it was still up. Going to work and worrying if they had sold it. Obsessed.

On saturday it was mine.

That was the only car I looked at. The only one I sat in. The one I bought.

Of course it’s a week or so to get prepped and ready.

The one thing Mini really loves is presentation. To the side of the showroom is a glass enclosed box with a garage door filled with gallery lighting, and basically it’s a little staging area for you to walk from the signing desk over to your new car and drive it out in the most special-feeling way possible.

I remember the salesguy explaining what various buttons did and giving me the rundown on my new car, but I barely noticed. I was sitting there, hands on the small, thick wheel just ready to run.

It was snowing. It was dark. The xenon lights seemed so futuristic, how they brighten and do a little self-leveling glance up and down upon startup.

My friend Nick had driven me there to pick up the car and I drove out gliding on fresh snow, parked next to him. He hops in and we basically just squeal with indeterminate glee together. Everything felt a million times fancier than I deserved, that I had ever driven before. I felt like I had gotten away with something, that they’d notice sometime eventually and take it from me.

But they never did.

I remember driving home that night on The Crow with the biggest grin. Nick was following in his Jeep and we’d playfully pass each other. I didn’t have the whole ipod thing set up then, so it was playing whatever dumb hype pop radio station.

Something about all of that, you know, genuinely felt like flying. The silent glide of snow and drizzled red reflections and having heated seats for the first time, looking up at the streetlights through the roof glass.

I put 60,000+ kilometers on it over the next years. I’ve crashed it, I’ve been crashed into. I spent months biking to work while she was in the shop. Every time I got it back it felt like home, like sliding into a perfect jacket.

Cars, I think, really are a part of us. Transcending the appliance and mere transportation of it all, they are an exosuit and a mecha we pilot. They are a canvas for customization and for all the little quirks we learn about ourselves.these were the original wheels it came with, my first time plastidipping anything.

This weekend I bought something else.

I feel… a shocking lot of emotions: nostalgia, excitement, sadness, that little knot in your stomach of knowing that someday you’ll never see your best friend again.

But mostly, I feel proud. Maybe it’s dumb to praise an inanimate object like that, but I genuinely loved and appreciated every trip in that car. Every grocery drive, every pizza pickup, every time you looked back to see it simply sit in the parking lot.

So, thank you Mini. You’ve literally saved my life a few times, picking fights with SUVs and surviving semi trucks. Thank the engineers. You’ve made me smile like not much else can. I’m sure I’ll own many cars in my life, but like a good dog or an old flame there’s some part of our soul that sticks with each one in turn. The memories, the hours we’ve spent, the things we’ve seen.

I’ve only sold one car in my life — that original red Pulsar — and when I handed over the keys and saw her leave I cried a bit, as I will too here.

It’s like putting a beloved pet down or something, this anthropomorphized attachment we feel with a chunk of metal and glass.

Humans are bizarre.

But the tears are real.

I love you.