My Corvair

A couple of days ago, on my favorite morning news show, they demonstrated a car that can drive itself. Very helpful and pretty amazing, and it reminded of my first car which sometimes seemed to have a mind of its own.  You remember Corvairs?  There was even a book written about them, Unsafe at Any Speed.  I bought my 1961 Corvair, used, in 1965 for $800.  It was my first car and I bought it, practiced driving it, and then got my drivers license, in time to finish my last college courses and start my first year of teaching.
Such a nice car, until it turned on me.  I was driving back to Ball State one Monday morning after a weekend at home, when I took a curve a little too fast, and before I knew it, my car had spun around, rolled over and up on its wheels again, and I was sitting in the car in a field, looking through an open space and watching my windshield rocking gently on the ground in front of the car.
Two weeks before, my mother had sent me money to have seat belts installed in that car (they weren't standard back then) and I walked away from that accident with only a tiny scratch on one knee.  I walked to a nearby farmhouse and use their phone to call my father and tell him what had happened.  His first words were "Are you ok?" When I assured him I was he said "That's all that matters."  I always loved my daddy but never more than at that moment.
He came and picked me up, drove me the rest of the way to college and then proceeded to fight my battle with the insurance company.  They wanted to total it and give me $400.  That got my daddy's German up, since he had never in his life had a claim on his insurance policy, which also covered me, and he thought that 50% depreciation in less than a month was pretty steep. So he asked what other options we ahd and they said they would pay to have it repaired so he said "Fix it."  It cost the insurance company $2,000 but I ended up with a rebuilt car which I drove for the next six years, until my husband and I traded it in on our VW camper.  By then it had well over 100,000 miles on it and I could see the road through the rusted out spot in the floor board on the driver's side. But I never had another accident in taht car and, with the engine in back, it turned out to be a wonderful car to drive on snowy roads when I lived in upstate New York.