It's in great condition, and runs like a top, after I changed out the distributor. (Cost me a hundred bucks, found a used one.) The doors still sound and feel like a bank vault when you close them, and there's not a rattle or squeak to be found.

Since I've had it, I've put a pair of tires on it, and replaced the rear brake pads and rotors. I've put thousands of miles on him, without a hiccup.

The guy that I got it from, a chronically unemployed DJ whom I will call Dunce, got it from the mechanic that had worked on the car it's entire life, and bought it from the doc's wife's estate when she passed on. Arno, the mechanic, has all the service records from Day One, kept with all the anal level of detail you would expect from an Austrian-born, factory-trained master mechanic that started to apprentice while still in high school.

The Dunce got hard up for money, and tried to sell it. As he was so broke that he couldn't even afford to put a new distributor in it, he decided that he would rig it. The distributor was worn and loose, but he could get the car to halfway run but stuffing, get this, wooden shims, between the distributor housing and the intake manifold to hold it in place.

With this lovely marvel on engineering in place, the car would run for about five miles, or the first big bump, whichever came first. He wondered why he couldn't get anybody to buy it. I watched this comedy from the sidelines for a few days, just shaking my head. He had asked me repeatedly if I wanted to buy it, but I told him I already had two vehicles, and didn't need a third.

After about a week, he begged me to buy it from him. I asked him how much he'd sell it to me for. Book on the car is about four grand, and he'd been asking $2500. I ended up buying it for a grand.

So I had to give the car a name.

Well, despite my distaste for most things of a "spiritual" nature, I'm fairly anthromorphic about some things, particularly cars and computers. I always give them a name, and truly think of them as partaking in that quality that we call "life" to a greater or lesser degree.

In fact, I believe everything around us, from dirt to dahlias to Dells to dolphins to Dubya, is alive, in varying degrees, (with the possible exception of dogmatic yellow-dog Democrats :-) and that between the quick and the dead there lies not a dichotomy, but a spectrum. But this is fodder for a different discussion. Again I digress, as I am wont to do.

So anyway, after much scratching of the haid and intense ponderment, (Fritz? Hans? Aaahnold? Adolph?) I decide to call him Otto.

I think of him as a him, though many of my cars have been female. He's all stolid, square shouldered and business-like, no swoopy aerodynamic curves for him. Were he a person, he'd be a hard-working, stout, middle-aged German burgher, with an ample gut from a lifetime of lager, potato pancakes and bratwurst, along with a good helping of strudel for dessert.

Otto Bonn. From Stuttgart. Otto Bonn von Stuttgart. :-)