An Ode to the First Generation Ford Taurus, One Specimen in Particular

I was thinking about Birdy the other day (RIP) and how she had died a pathetic and cruel death, but one from which it is possible to be resurrected.  My mother's old Ford Taurus wagon, however, was not so lucky.  Without getting bogged down in details, we were in a head-on collision in that car when a fellow in an old Ford pickup went into our lane to go around a car stalled in his lane.  I actually can't find any pictures of that accident—we had some at one point—but suffice to say our car was fairly well crunched up afterward.  She was towed away to a junkyard.  My mom and my two friends and I suffered some injuries but were able to remove ourselves from the car.  I feel like I never really got closure with that car.  Never got to say goodbye.  So please indulge me while I talk a little bit about her in remembrance.

We got the car second-hand from family.  Mom decided to name her Thelmalouise (might've been two words: Thelma Louise) partly in honor of the mother of the person we got it from.  This was a burgundy wagon, and it had been used for hauling things around on a farm (things meaning sheep on more than a few occasions).  It looked a little something like this:

But the paint wasn't nearly this nice.

It had two identical sparkly Pluto cartoon stickers on the fake wood in the middle of the dash, and sometimes I would look at them and wonder why they were there.  It had a sunroof (the GL was classy stuff), but the caveat was that the sunroof didn't function and in fact leaked.  So whenever it rained, the headliner (the fabric covering the roof interior) would get soaked through, and the backseat began to grow algae, giving the gray fabric seat a nice green tinge.  Mom drove me and my friend and my boyfriend at the time home regularly, and my boyfriend would always put his sweater down in the seat for me to sit on.  Our carpool group affectionately called the car Swampbuggy.  The power windows and door locks functioned, if I recall, which for me was a real treat and a big change from my dad's Corolla with the cranky handles for the windows.

The paint on the hood and roof was oxidizing horrifically (but not to rust quite yet), and the passenger door squealed like a pig every time it was opened.  But my mom did like how the steering was responsive (a claim I retrospectively find questionable).  And I will say that to my memory, the car never had any breakdowns.  (I remember walking with Mom a couple blocks home from school when the clutch gave out in the Dodge Omni she'd had before Thelmalouise.  That one left her hanging several times.)  This Taurus carried me to and from school for a long time, and it made itself quite a reputation among my carpool friends.  And then, when it had to, the car protected the four of us as best it could in a head-on collision where the combined speed was probably about 70 MPH.  Bent and broken and shattered and dirty from the ditch, she was carried away to a junkyard, where she probably couldn't offer any useful parts to anyone.

I honestly miss that car.

You used to see them on the road.  The light blue and darker blue and burgundy and icky beige late '80's and early '90's Taurus sedans and wagons.  I realized recently though that they've pretty much dropped off—I don't see but one every few months it seems.  I won't beat around the bush; they're ugly and awful.  But I do unreasonably wish there were more of them around.

To the first generation Taurus—it wasn't so bad.

And the sedan had seventeen cubic feet of cargo space!

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Photo 1:  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/1st_Ford_Taurus_wagon_--_04-11-2012_front.JPG

Photo 2:  http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/FjDbPf5zmt8/hqdefault.jpg