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Forty-five years ago today, work was finished on my car at the plant in St. Louis. According to the trim tag on the car, it was completed on Oct. 7, 1971, a matter of months after my own birth. With any luck, it was a day my mother spent with me and my sister on the beach as my father worked at the nearby Pensacola Naval Air Station. Nearing the end to his service in the Navy, he was a little less than a year away from sailing far away to Vietnam at that point. While at sea, my mother would care for me and my sister far away in a little house in Berea, Ky., where I grew up.

This car spent time on both coasts, was in Georgia and by the 1980s it ended up in Arkansas. Beneath its current shade of green is evidence of maroon and white paint on top of the original gray. Far from pampered, this old car lived quite a life and covered a lot of ground. There is a tweak to the bumper from some sort of minor collision at its front and the evidence of some long-ago calamity hides in plain sight in its rear thanks to a very poor repair. No one lives this long without some difficult times and some scars. I've got a few of my own, to be sure.