A Long Goodbye

It was probably summer 1998, but it was specifically in Colorado Springs, coming down Vindicator to turn left onto Rockrimmon in my aging 88 Audi 90, when the first first-generation Audi A8 I ever saw, an Emerald Pearl,* crossed my path.

Woah.

I knew of them, and had even seen pictures on the then new-fangled word-wide-web thingy, thanks to Nestcape Navigator; but in the flesh?  Stunning.  Top of the line. Expensive.  I desired one and entertained the thought that some day, who knows how far into the future, this would be the car that I would have.

It was likely summer of 1999, but it was specifically in Mahwah, NJ, outside the Macaroni Grille on Route 17 North, that I had occasion to walk around a Brilliant Black** one, peering in the driver's window and admiring everything on that gorgeous instrument panel, even the fonts on the speedometer that read up to 160 mph.

It was late December, 2002, when my relatively-recently purchased 94 Audi 100 CS was turned into by, well, an idiot.  My insurance company inexplicably found me at fault and I found myself, recently off of a decent commission check, at a dealership looking at a five year old Ming Blue*** with some 73k some odd miles on it for $18,900.

This had been a $65,000 car five years earlier.  It was my dream. Smoothly accelerating to 60 in mere moments out of a traffic light in Golden, CO, the decision was made.

She was mine.

Leather, summer and winter packages, heated seats all around, all the modern conveniences of what is, ironically, a modern pre-turn-of-the-millenium executive sedan.

We commuted. We went skiing. Months of nights were spent in airport parking garages awaiting my return. Highway cruises. Canyon runs. Winter drives over snow-pack.  Quattro, quattro, quattro.  The occasional drag race with the unsuspecting (and shocked!) Mustang or similar. Many a long drive home, late at night, after a long week of business.  Idling in rest areas for quick naps. Negative 17 fahrenheit in the deep cold of winter. Pulled over a time or three. And ever the joy of her 300 horses and 300 torque, pulling, pulling, pulling.  "Scotty, I need more power!" "She's giving you all she can, captain!"

Wash, clay-bar, rub, glaze, wax, buff, amaze.

It will probably be fall of 2015, but it will specifically be a love affair of 175,000 miles, twelve and a half (and more) years, across the country and around the northeast, through transmissions, drive-shafts, fuels pumps, tires innumerable, brake-pads and rotors, and a lot of oil, brought crushingly to an end when she dies.

The symptoms are shudders and gasps, hesitations and asthmatic idles; windshield squirters that don't, turn signals that no longer cancel when the turn is done, arm-rests gone missing, and a radio whose antennae was decapitated in the automatic car wash more than a decade past.

She's old.  She's tired. Her niece and nephew, an A4 and an S4, have taken over her home in the garage but are still chided for their brashness and lack of refinement by comparison with this regal grand dame of German engineering.

Merc, Beemer, you know she caused you to up your game. She is a D2 A8; her vanity plate says QUA8RO; she is my car.

Her time grows short.  When, how will we say goodbye?

* Paint code LZ6U M6, Emerald pearl effect, it turns out.
** Paint codeY9B A2, Brilliant Black.  I was in Mahwah, doing consulting work for Becton Dickinson on a prototype insulin injection pen, where one of the people I worked with there mentioned his father had purchased one.
*** Paint code LZ5L Q5 Ming blue pearl effect.  It's black, but really it's blue, but really it's metal-flak purple-hued blue when all gussied up.