A 2001 Jeep Wrangler

I had always dreamt of owning a Jeep Wrangler. When I was in high school, I inherited the “practical” sedan that my brother received for his 16th birthday when he left it behind to go to college. I, also, eventually, left to go to college.

Well, I remember odd-jobbing and gigging my way through school, scraping together enough money to finally afford a banged-up TJ (model years 1996-2006) that I found on Craigslist. Even with its 125k+ miles on the odometer, it seemed the coolest car I'd ever seen. I e-mailed the poster. It was still available.

I remember riding out on the Metra commuter rail – the furthest I’d ever been from Chicago – to meet the owner with a literal duffel bag full of cash. We met in a parking lot in the suburbs, the car ran “fine”, the title and cash changed hands, and I owned a Jeep! I should have been terrified (now appalled): I’d never driven a standard transmission before then, but somehow I managed to make it all the way to Hyde Park, across an hour and a half of highways and through the start-stop herky-jerk traffic of the city. It's amazing that I didn’t stall out somewhere on the highway and get rear-ended at 85 mph.

Some of my best memories from Chicago happened in that Jeep: my friends packing in and driving across Chicagoland to go hiking, or to see The Great Galena Balloon Festival, or to spend Thanksgiving in Evanston with friends who’d grown up there and were (maybe) happy to have us over for a huge “extended family” affair. I picked up my first date since high school in that car, drove around the Great Lakes with my roommate in that car, piled everyone in to day trip to St. Louis and see the Gateway Arch in that car.

In the end, I sold the Wrangler before moving to New York. Maybe I should have kept it, driven cross-country and parked it wherever the hell I possible could find on 37th street. Maybe then I’d be hauling friends up to the Hudson River Valley on weekends, driving everyone out to Vermont to to see the Fall foliage, skiing out at American Dream or Hunter Mtn. every winter. Oh, well. It would've been expensive, especially for a broke grad student.