I’ve sold my 2003 Subaru Forster XS to a good and close neighbor. The little golden SUV soon will be filled with the sounds of two little girls and their young mother. They’ll wave as they drive by our house, and I’ll wave as I drive by theirs.

Still, I’ve had a difficult time selling this car to them. Not based on any demands by the buyer or me, but unexpectedly, it was an emotional experience. I bought the car while my mother was visiting us in 2003, and she came with me to the dealership—the start of her relationship with the car, as well as mine.

The following years of the aughts saw that car having a role in the final changes in my mother’s life. At my urging, she sold her house in North Carolina, the one my father had died in, earlier in 2003. My mother, my wife Suzy and I bought a condo for her in our Eastern Massachusetts city—an attractive and large condo within two blocks of a vibrant downtown. Five minutes from our house by the Subaru Forester.

I drove the Forester down to North Carolina to help her pack up the house and to drive her and the dog back to Melrose, Massachusetts. The movers were due to come at the end of that week, take the household items and place them into storage while the condo was painted, then deliver them. During innumerable phone calls, my mother enacted the charade that she was packing her belongings to some degree. Any degree. When I arrived however, nothing had been packed. Not one box.

During that week, I packed everything that was going, and tossed the rest. Not the last time I held all the objects that defined my parents’ lives in my hands, before wrapping and packing them, or worse, throwing them out.

The night before the movers were due, my mother still had not packed her clothes. I lost my temper. I hadn’t any inkling that her faculties were failing, had failed, not then. Unfortunately, I remained encased in that particular stupidity for nearly the rest of her life. But whether I was driving her to our house from the condo for dinner, or later, driving to visit her in a locked unit of a nursing home, I was driving the Forester. But for all the heartache, we always had laughs, my mother and me, in and out of the Forester, and to just short of the end.

While preparing the Forester for sale, those memories made me cry, a bottle of Armor All wipes in hand. Swamped by a blubbery nostalgia, I tried to remember all the cars that my parents owned. Starting at the beginning of my life, my father owned a 1939 Lincoln Continental. I remember standing up on the back seat when I must have been three. No car seat. No seat belt. At some point, the Lincoln Continental was banished and nothing replaced it. We lived in Brooklyn, so there was no need.

After our move to White Plains in Westchester, my father bought a car. A Vauxhall. Why and where he found such a British car in 1959, I haven’t the foggiest. It was small with a gray exterior and red leather seats. An ordinary little car, the Vauxhall was known as the English Ford—why didn’t he simply buy a Ford?

My father and I spent many Saturdays driving the Vauxhall to visit vintage car showrooms. In adoration, we approached the shining Lagondas, Bentleys, Rolls-Royce, Duesenbergs, Astin-Martins and Bugattis. Neither of us disturbed the hushed tones of the showrooms—chapels where few came to pray—nor did my sticky little hands smudge the shine. Back we drove in the Vauxhall, dreams of larger, more beautiful, more muscular cars of the 1920s and 1930s in our heads. No dreams of the American cars with fins and bulbous lights for us.

My father never owned a car like the showroom cars we worshipped. Of all the cars he owned—the Vauxhall, a turquoise, tank-like Rambler, two hump-backed Volvos, a hideous and fatally flawed purple Pontiac, several nondescript Ford sedans—I think he only liked his Crown Victoria. The Crown Vicky was a favorite cop car at the time, and could be pushed to 140 mph, which may have been part of the allure, although it remained untested, I’m sure.

I never have owned a super car either. I did buy the first Ford Probe, as close to a racecar as I’ve ever gotten, despite my childhood certainty that one day I’d zip around corners in a hunter green Morgan. The dear old Subaru Forester is pokey and rides like a buckboard, but its steadiness and sure-footedness make up for a delay in acceleration. Not a Morgan—more like a golden version of the 1959 Vauxhall. The Forester served me well and will keep its new owners safe and sound—they’ve named it Goldie Horn. Why didn’t I think of that?