Forest Green Ford Contour

In 2016, I bought my first car—a 1997 forest green Ford Contour—for eight hundred dollars cash. Despite being almost twenty years old, the car had only covered forty thousand miles, which at the time I believed was indicative of its shape. My main concern was how difficult it would be to find parking in Brooklyn, but when I brought this up, the old Italian woman who sold me the car said, “Oh, darling, don’t worry. This car was blessed by the Pope.” So I gave him the money, and he gave me the big car keys and a cross to hang on the rear view mirror.

It turns out the car has not been blessed by the Pope. As soon as I left, I found out that the AC was not working. It doesn’t matterI think, at least the windows were down. Minutes later, I was stuck behind a dump truck in heavy New Jersey traffic in mid-July. It doesn’t matterI think, at least it drives. That night, for reasons I can no longer remember, I named the car My Sweet Henrietta.

Uglier than the Escape and less reliable than the Focus, the Contour was discontinued in 1999, just four years after entering the US market. On the rare occasions I can convince my friends to come with me, I joke, “They really don’t make them like they used to.” And they’ll say, “This thing is real American muscle,” or “Listen to this baby snoring,” or “Does it use premium materials or diesel or what?” But our banter would end as soon as we reached the first red light, stop sign, or traffic jam. There’s nothing scarier than stopping in My Sweet Henrietta, which has two engine mounts missing and vibrates violently every time it stops.

In retrospect, it feels almost symbolic that I only realized My Sweet Henrietta’s problems when it was quiet. On the highway, you can’t feel the engine shaking, and as long as you’re cruising, the windows down keep you pretty cool. But every moment spent idling feels like your last, and when parked, the car leaks oil like a sieve—the gaskets are never replaced, and the entire undercarriage is corroded by road salt, rust, and dirt. In retrospect, it’s almost moving to remember how many frustrated hours I spent circling busy Brooklyn blocks, unable to find a parking space—as if My Sweet Henrietta couldn’t bear the thought of stopping.

Somehow, My Sweet Henrietta went on like this for three years. Somehow, My Sweet Henrietta got me to work almost every day, and to a nicer grocery store, and even to Boston once—and twice to Philly. But one morning, as I rounded the edge of Green-Wood Cemetery and started rolling down the hill, the brakes stopped working. Each warning light flashed quickly on the dashboard, then suddenly went off. There was a loud crack—which I later learned was the engine belt breaking—and then all my power steering was gone. I pulled the electronic brake and it suddenly stopped.

On the side of the road near the cemetery, I called my mechanic—a guy who was honest enough to tell me not to bother fixing my car, but dishonest enough to always let it pass inspection. “Stop that,” he said. “Maybe you’ll get fifty dollars.” It was summer again, and the tow truck driver joked while looking under the hood, “No Freon, huh?” and “What century are these spark plugs from?” and “Normally, I would ask when you last changed your oil, but you don’t have any oil left to change.” He loaded the car into the bed of his truck, tied it up, and gave me the cash. I left the cross hanging on the mirror.

Mathew Weitman’s debut poetry collectionCampus Novels, forthcoming with Tupelo Press. His work can be found at Copper Nickel, Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He coedited with July Westhale and Felipe Acevedo Riquelme Rolando Cárdenas: On the Life and Work of a Chilean Teacher (Pleiades Press, 2026).

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Gaming center adalah sebuah tempat atau fasilitas yang menyediakan berbagai perangkat dan layanan untuk bermain video game, baik di PC, konsol, maupun mesin arcade. Gaming center ini bisa dikunjungi oleh siapa saja yang ingin bermain game secara individu atau bersama teman-teman. Beberapa gaming center juga sering digunakan sebagai lokasi turnamen game atau esports.