good-bye days of yore

I still remember well the first time I saw that car. I was walking home from a typical first-grade day at Garfield Elementary in Youngstown Ohio. From across the street, a guy in an unfamiliar metallic-tan car wearing sunglasses (the guy, not the car) says to me, "Hey. Want a ride?"

I looked at him for a moment then asked, "Are you my dad?"

He had unannounced taken the day off from work and gone out and bought the sexy new vehicle, a '49 Mercury. I guess he wanted to surprise mom, although she always hated surprises.

The New Merc was bigger and more powerful than the little black '39 Ford sedan it replaced and looked exactly like the one in the picture. So from then on we rode in style, and those were indeed the days.

Today Ford announced that it's retiring the brand. The Mercury is now relegated to the boneyard of extinct automobiles whose names are fading like half-forgotten magical incantations from America's illustrious past -- Plymouth, with its echo of the famous rock; Pontiac, the Indian leader who warred bravely and tragically against the white invaders...

Considering what we now know about oil exploitation, automobile emissions, and the toxic runoff from brake dust (which is turning Puget Sound into a dead zone), all the romance of the golden age of automobiles is now vanished. So it's appropriate that instead of the Mercury, the Plymouth, the Pontiac, the Kaiser, Packard and Nash Rambler, we're now left with nothing but the new Nissan Jellybean, the Honda Gnome-Mobile, and the Chevy Grunt pick-em-up truck.