I nickname everything. Pets, cars, even my wife and daughter. It's an unavoidable habit most likely inherited from my father.

Some examples. Our dog's name is Foxy, which has logically led to: Floppy, Flippy, Flappy, Bone-Flap, Boxy, Boxton Floppily, Dog Butt and so on. The Mustang's nickname is Wanda after the fish in A Fish Called Wanda. In the movie, Micheal Palin walks into his apartment and says "'Ello Wanda" to the fish. Whenever the Mustang was in the garage, I would walk in and say "'Ello Wanda". You get the idea.

Until a couple of weeks ago a nickname for my trusty Honda Civic had not come to mind. I was driving at night in the rain and the battery light came on for no reason. It was the first instance of age related odd behavior I had encountered in three years of ownership. Somewhere between trying to de-fog the windshield and switching the tape I muttered something like "that's just frickin' swell Snappy". So there it was. The nickname had finally presented itself - Snappy the Wonder Honda.

I felt good about this; it seemed to give the car a new personality. I vowed to get that oil change I had been putting for too long. I would take Snappy to get cleaned and detailed and prepared for winter. I would install an actual CD player instead of using that crappy car adapter. New tires were a must. A boy and his car - it was going to be great.

Then, a week ago, it came to an abrupt and unexpected end. An accident I thought wasn't that bad has turned out to be a total loss - the cost of repairs equal to the value of the car. It seems the impact shifted things to the left which would be very hard to shift back to the right. Such is the way in the sometimes cruel life the automobile. Snappy looks at me now, sitting there, waiting for his final ride to the scrap heap, not unlike the football team in Beetlejuice. Puzzled, he seems to say, "Coach... I don't think we survived that crash..."

Oh well, the wife has been dropping hints (like an anvil on Wyle E. Coyote's head) that she wants to maybe get one of these or one of these anyway.