MY CADILLAC NEEDS SERVICE? REPAIR ? MY HONDA TOO!?@%#^&*@@

Beware, what is coming is a primal cry for understanding.  It is the "coming of age" story of the relationship between an adult and his sent from heaven car.  I kid you not, I  had this immature vs mature tension within me for some time before I finally realized how unrealistic my prejudices had driven me to be.  I was on the threshold between the inside of one culture and the outside of another.  I was driving a nice mid sixties Olds Cutlass which I had bought through connections for $150.00 in 1977.  Then a friend of mine who was one of the last gas station/repair shop wizards told me that he had this "cherry" 1964, four-door Cadillac sedan for $750.00.  Since he was a childhood classmate of the same culture, religion and a host of other intangibles, I trusted him, put $750.00 in my pocket and went to his place to snag this beauty.  Beauty she was.  Believe me.  And there would come a day when she would save my life, I think.  But that is another story.
We all know that Cadillacs are perfect, right?  Right.  Just like we all know that Hondas are perfect.  Just like we know that IBM is perfect.  Cadillacs have been around for a long time and they have had good years and bad years.  However, and I mean this, However, we still walk around in our waking hours with the conviction that they are perfect.  We love it when one goes by us and all we hear is the gentle hissss of the perfect tires going by.  We dream and dream and then one day, a friend offers us the perfect car that had been driven by the proverbial old maid on weekends.  We gobble it up.  It doesn't take long before we learn that the perfect Cadillac is a machine.  Note, we can't bring ourselves to say that it is "just" a machine.  We have to somehow force ourselves into the reality that what we considered to be perfection is 'just' a machine.  I got my first awakening when the timing started to not be "right."  It figures that this small aberration was not a big deal and mine was going to be the only car in the garage because after all it was nearly 14 years old.  Whooo, boy!  I got the shock of my life.  I had a one hour wait.  There was a long line of warped perfection in front of me.  I could not believe it.  I struggled with it.  I brought myself to try to say something witty to one of the mechanics and failed.  Whatever it was that I said, his reply was, "Caddies are a piece of shit."  What?  $750.00 for fertilizer that wouldn't do anything for my plant?  $750.00 for perfection that was being blasphemed by this uneducated, uncouth blue-collar knave.  I tell you, it was a very long wait for the car to be delivered to me.  I caressed it lovingly, gently and smoothly got in and experienced it's resurrected perfection.  The boorish buffoon of a mechanic be damned.  Caddies are perfect, I know.  This one was all the more perfect because it had a bench style front seat.  You know [you oldies know] the one that we used to call the SOB seat.  This in opposition to the birth control, stylish bucket seats that are still the rage.  I have a Canadian Cousin who still maintains that this style was designed by the European branch of Planned Parenthood.  
After two or three years of babying my piece of perfection, I had grown into the realization that Cadillacs were indeed just machines and machines by their very nature have strong points and weak ones.  Just like human beings.  I thought that I had learned my lesson and that I was a big boy now.  Then I made the mistake of buying a $2,400.00, brand new Honda Civic Hatchback in 1981.  In fact, January 2, 1981.  I still had the Cadillac, and as far as I was concerned, it had downgraded itself to "less than perfect."  Soon, the Honda became perfect.  I was convinced that I had found mechanical perfection.  It took a long time, but it too fell into desuetude after about 210,000 miles and I had to part with it.  As far as I know, it is, to this day, perhaps pleasing some poor family in a third world country somewhere.
It has now been eight years and 150,000 miles that we own and drive a Honda Civic four-door sedan Hybrid.  It too is doing its best to bring me back to my long forsaken conviction that mechanical things can last forever.  Even today, after having to spend some $1,200.00 to celebrate its 150,000+ miles, I heard the technical people tell me that it was in marvelous condition for a car of its vintage and mileage.  That didn't stop them from taking my money.  
No matter what, therefore, Cadillac or Honda, it's still only a machine and machines do wear out and die, long before we humans do.  I try not to be the harbinger of bad news, but I figure that we all have to learn, even if it means having to be disabused of our fallacious convictions.