Anthropomorphism makes me sad

Now there's a nice, big, college type word for you. A true ten dollar word: anthropomorphism. It means giving human traits to animals or inanimate objects. Yogi Bear for example is anthropomorphic: a bear that walks and talks like a human.

I think we all do that to one degree or another. I find myself doing it with the van I just replaced. I snapped a picture of her yesterday, for old times's sake, for my memory, because I thought she looked sad. As anyone who has ever read The Family Circus comic growing up knows, our old cars feel sad when we give up on them.

As I arrived at the Shop this morning, driving up in my new old van (which I described yesterday) I looked over at my old old one. It's temporarily parked to the side of the old barn as I decide exactly what to do with it. Anyway, I looked over at it and I sighed. Heavily. I'm gonna miss it, that old Chevy Venture. For $1500 four years ago, I got 68,000 miles out of her. We had a lot of good times together, making pickups and deliveries and going on product demos. We must have went to Hessel in Michigan's glorious Upper Peninsula six or eight times. I helped my son get his new stove home with it. She took me to curling many times, to golf and to see friends and family, to Church and to baseball games. How do you not grow an attachment?

She still runs okay. But the transmission ain't right and there's a few other relatively unimportant, minor issues. She could still go on indefinitely. But the time to buy a car, as me Grandpa Joe's old friend Sam said once, is before you need it, before you have to have it. Then you can take the time to look around a bit, and maybe stumble into a good deal like the one I did. It was too good to pass up.

Still, that maroon Venture sits by the old barn today looking tired and worn. And kinda sad. I understand her because, in that odd sort of a very human way, a very anthropomorphic way, I feel kinda sad too.