Maine cars are said to be among the oldest in the nation, so all I’m really trying to do is to remove one aging clunker from the traffic stream.

But doing one’s civic duty is not always a simple matter. Some cars refuse to give up the ghost, no matter how old and decrepit they become. Like aging dancers, they never seem to know when to hobble off the stage. They just keep hoofing along, embarrassing themselves and everyone around them in the process. Take my 12-year-old Toyota Necrosis, for instance, which is being reclaimed by the earth in an orgy of oxidation. Dust to rust to dust again. Yet the senile old trouper never fails to fire up on command, shedding rotten hunks of itself as it chugs away from the curb. In an ideal world, the solution would be to buy another car and sell the rust bucket for a few hundred bucks to some teen-ager – a teen-ager other than your own, of course, whose idea of a perfectly glorious weekend would be to hold a Bondoh-and-beer bash for a few grease-monkey pals. Apparently I’m not meant to live in that ideal world, however. Mysterious forces constantly thwart my best efforts to get rid of the beast once and for all, to finally be free from a jalopy that requires a separate key for each door and sounds as if it has a bowling ball rolling loose in its trunk each time it goes over a wrinkle in the road.

The first part of the plan went flawlessly: I bought another car. Although not a new one, it has brought me into the 1990s, which is as up-to-date as I’ve been in years of car ownership. I can also wash this one without worrying that the fenders will disintegrate if I rub too hard with the chamois cloth. The next stage, of course, was to put a for-sale sign in the window of the clunker and park it in front of the house. I would start by asking $800 – hey, a guy’s gotta dream – and then accept a best offer of nothing less than, say, $100. Then the plan began to unravel. My son instantly appropriated the thing. Suddenly, the vehicle that once shamed him in front of his friends, the car that his parents felt was becoming an increasingly unreliable form of teen transportation, magically became his very own set of wheels. First, he was just going to take it up the street to a friend’s house. No harm in that. Soon, he was driving it to school, leaving the bus to the carless unfortunates. He promised to make a for-sale sign for the window, but just never seemed to get around to it. I reminded him that in order to sell something, it’s usually a good idea to tell people that it’s actually for sale. When he finally did put a sign in the car, it mysteriously blew out the window somewhere out on the highway.

One day, he left the headlights on at school and cooked the battery. He and a friend tried jumper cables, he said, but nothing happened. To get the dead car off the lot and back to the house where it might be sold, I had to buy a new battery. In an ideal world, the clerk would have sold me the correct battery. Since I don’t live in that ideal world, I got the wrong one, which took two hours of knuckle-busting manipulation to hook up. When my son turned the key, silence. So we called a tow truck, which hauled the Necrosis to the garage, which charged me more than $100 to correctly reinstall the expensive wrong battery and tell me that my son’s misguided attempt at jump-starting the car had fried the radio and a few other handy electronic devices that a potential buyer might consider desirable. The mechanic’s bill also listed a few costly repairs that he said should be done before the inspection sticker runs out in a couple of weeks. At this rate, I figure it will cost me about $1,000 just to get the car in shape for a junk dealer to come and take it away.

There’s got to be a better solution. I suppose I could take a shotgun to the thing, but I doubt whether a few more holes would matter. So if all else fails, maybe I’ll just don a rain suit and total that rust bucket by running it through a carwash. Hold the wax, please.