Gene Replacement Therapy

Vintage Weingarten, dragged from the vault

Editor's note: As this column goes to press, Gene Weingarten is recovering from double knee-replacement surgery. This column originally ran on March 3, 2002.

I am test-driving a used car on a suburban Virginia road so choked with chain stores that they seem to smoosh together: BurgerLube, Next Day Chicken, TGIFried Depot, Taco Discounters.

The car is an ordinary two-door 1994 Honda Accord EX. Its color is so cheerless and nondescript that I cannot actually think of an adjective to describe it. Call it bleen -- a grumpy blue-green. If there were a guy named Gloomy Gus and he were pushing an old stick in the mud while wearing a wet blanket, the blanket would be the color of this car.

In short, I should be bored. But I am not. I am scared -- terrified of damaging an irreplaceable object. I am moving up through the gears gingerly, with tentative little underpowered girly shifts, worried that this car might at any minute simply liquefy, oozing into the pavement like a scoop of Jell-O plopped onto a hot skillet.

The odometer says 687,179.

Can this possibly be right? No, says Buck, it isn't. Buck Howard, who is sitting beside me, is a salesman from Hendrick Honda in Woodbridge, which recently bought the car from its previous owner and plans to display it. The odometer is all wrong, Buck says, and I should pay it no mind.

Whew.

This is the car's second odometer, Buck explains. The first one pooped out at 394,203 miles, and had to be replaced. In total, this car has been driven 1,081,382 miles.

I take the next corner at the speed of continental drift.

Calling this car "used" is an inexcusable understatement, like calling the Third Reich "rude." Other cars -- several Mercedeses and at least one Volvo -- have achieved 1 million miles, but it is unlikely that any car, anywhere, has ever done it so fast.

I've always been fascinated by really old things that still work. I repair antique clocks. I bought a 120-year-old home. I love my wife. (Just kidding, doll. Ha-ha-ha-ha. Ow.)

The fact is, while others read the car pages to fantasize about owning the new Jaguar XK8, I am squinting through the classifieds to see how cheaply one might obtain a 1986 Tercel that "runs good." To me, age confers both dignity and eccentricity, and I value both.