Her name was derived from her provenance. She was a gift when I returned from Peace Corps in honor of my graduation from Washington and Lee University (W&L, or Dub-Yuh-NELL). As a moderate hippie, I certainly couldn't call her Dubya.
I chose a Golf in large part because a Peace Corps friend spoke glowingly of her old Golf, a small but mighty car that just wouldn't die. Resilience seemed like a good trait in a car and so when I started test-driving options, the Golf was already high on my list. I loved her immediately, her nifty interior lights, her smooth ride, her heated seats. She seemed spunky and fun-loving, sassy but solid. I will admit some hope that maybe I was all those things, too.
We bought her in St. Louis but she spent only a brief time there. She had some hiccups in the beginning, a warped windshield was replaced, which damaged the windshield wipers. She was sorted out just in time for a move to Kansas City, a year now affectionately referred to as my "lost year" since I lived in a hovel of an apartment that included a collapsing ceiling over the shower and a Craigslist-acquired roommate that lived off cheese. Only cheese. Nelly was the sole object of worth I could count as mine. I didn't have a computer. I was sleeping on an air mattress. And I was making $10/hour and could barely afford my phone bill. Nelly was a daily reminder that something in my life was just fine, even if everything else seemed tenuously stitched together.
She carried my best friend, Megan, and I safely through the worst ice storm of my life, when a 4 hour drive became 9 hours. We rode in tank tops so that we could blast the heat against the windshield, the only way to keep the wipers from freezing. After a few hours, my nerves were shot, and Megan drove Nelly back home to Kansas City, with a stop on the way to aid a driver whose SUV had flipped off the highway.
Once I was accepted to Tulane for law school, Nelly made the thrilling trek to New Orleans, stuffed to miniscule capacity with everything I owned. My furniture in New Orleans was either acquired from the side of the road, if small enough to fit in the trunk, or the assemble-yourself variety you find at Big Lots, because assembly required furniture comes in boxes that fit in a Golf. You can find (or build) decent furniture with the constraints of a Golf for transport, so don't let her size fool you.
Nelly was my chariot for four evacuations, including Hurricane Katrina. She picked up my dear roommate, Stephanie, and drove south to Jackson and on to to New Orleans to survey the damage a couple of months after the storm. She sat in the driveway and kept watch along a destroyed street while Stephanie and I cleaned out a rotted fridge, threw a couch over the balcony, and while I tried to rescue the masses of journal entries, poems, and law school notes I'd left sitting next to an open window. Nelly carried us out of the city, too, past homes with red "X"s and numbers, out of the reach of the massive Army vehicles I'd never expected to see patrolling my home.
She returned to New Orleans, too, and embraced a recovery that meant more potholes, two stolen hubcaps, and heat that curdled the milk from a spilled latte within hours. She drove out of New Orleans, bound for Minneapolis, with the trepidation of knowing the winters thus far had not been adequate practice for what lie ahead.
The first large snow at the first Minnesota apartment was tricky given that I didn't own a shovel. Nelly was dug out of the snowplow-gifted snowbank with a frying pan until a neighbor laughingly came to our aid with a legit tool. Having read a terrifying article about hypothermia and blizzards, I stocked Nelly's trunk that first winter with granola bars, chef boyardee (logical), candles, and at least 12 boxes of matches. The chef boyardee was eventually discarded but I still find matches back there...
I have cried in her driver seat so many times, most recently after the receipt of devastating news. I've called my mother crying after a breakup, sitting in a Walgreens parking lot. I've gripped her steering wheel with frozen fingers after snow-caked trail runs. I've dug her out of 6 winters' worth of snowstorms. I've coaxed her engine to turn over at -19, knowing that the trick is to turn the key slowly backwards.
Nelly's last rites were read today. Having driven her into a cement pillar at a decent enough clip to deploy the airbags and smash headlights, bumper, and who knows what else, her life ended keeping me safe and relatively unscathed. I'll take a trip to the body shop to clean her out, take a picture with her last remaining legit hubcap (the rest are knockoffs), and thank her for a decade of devoted service. In a period of my life that often felt transient and unstable, she was a comfort. And I will miss her.
