150,000

I remember when it happened last night.  I was driving to Troy to play trivia at Meka’s Lounge in Troy; it was the new game for Marc and Anthony’s trivia game since their Monday night contests at Revolution Hall were shuttered.

I was on I-90, heading toward I-787. I had just taken the off-ramp, and was merging onto I-787, headed towards Troy.  And it happened.

The odometer on my dark red 1991 Pontiac 6000 tripped to 150,000 miles.

Nice.  This car has now made it three-fifths of the way from the equivalent distance from the earth to the moon.

This Pontiac 6000 is the first car I’ve ever owned outright, as opposed to driving my wife’s cars for years (one car was so small I kept referring to it as a “clown car,” which didn’t make Vicki very happy, since it fit her 4’10” height perfectly, but not my 6’1″ frame).  I acquired it in 2004 from my grandmother; it was her car and I didn’t think that a 92-year-old woman with cataracts and a valid Massachusetts driver’s license should be on the roads any more.  She agreed, and I drove the car home from Boston to Albany, nursing it along the way.  At the time, it barely had 40,000 miles on the odometer.

In the six years I’ve owned this car, I’ve driven it almost everywhere.  I drove it to Virginia to interview a collector of coin-operated video games; the guy had everything from an original PONG game with a wood cabinet, to the classics like Space Invaders, Tempest and Defender.

I drove it to Ottawa and then Toronto, essentially spending a few days driving around the cities that border Lake Ontario.

I drove it to Cleveland, taking my daughter Cassaundra to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for a record convention.

I drove it numerous times to Pennsylvania, where I gathered information in various libraries for a research project that restored the statistics of the first twelve seasons of the Continental Basketball Association.

I drove it to Rochester and Buffalo and Quebec and Manchester NH and Barre VT and Rockville MD and various other locales for Premier Basketball League home games.

I drove it as a background car in the upcoming Angelina Jolie film Salt.  It’ll probably appear in maybe 2/10ths of a second of actual film, but the studio still played me for my work.

I’ve jump-started at least three motorists’ cars whose batteries weren’t as strong as the Die-Hard I put into the “6” so many years ago.

The car has even saved my life on at least one occasion.  On a snowy day in 2006, I was at a red light on Western Avenue, just before the town line between Albany and Guilderland,when a Dodge Ram truck pulled up behind me – and didn’t stop.  CRASH into my rear fender, pulverizing my rear tail light.  The Dodge Ram truck (which, by the way, was driven by a cell-phone-using distracted-driving dumb-bell) had its front end nearly caved in.  My 6000, with its solid steel frame, only suffered a damaged tail light, which was quickly repaired by Mr. Mopar’s insurance check.

I’ve listened to at least 100,000 tunes in the 6000, dozens of episodes of Car Talk and Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! on NPR; I’ve driven down I-90 with Mike & Mike in the Morning on 104.5 FM; I’ve suffered through the painful broadcast tandem of John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman on long road trips; and I’ve marveled at the AM radio stations I could pick up in the wee hours, stations from Baltimore and Pittsburgh and Boston and Cincinnati on clear dark nights.

Maybe at some point I’ll get another car.  Maybe at some point I’ll upgrade to maybe a Ford Crown Victoria at a police auction, or some little “beater with a heater” at Little Motors or Fuccillo or something.

But for now, I’ll stay with the Pontiac 6000.  It still runs, and it still runs well.

And the new goal is 200,000 miles.