Whether it’s my advancing age, what I like to think of as continued maturation (or self-refinement), or simply the fact that I don’t like green cars, I no longer see what I once saw in a 1975 or 1976 Chrysler Cordoba. Even this très jolie 61,000-mile ’76 green machine can’t sway me from seeing it for what it really is—or was: Chrysler’s derivatively designed, “me too” entry into the booming personal luxury car market of the 1970s.
Wait… isn’t absence supposed to make the heart grow fonder? Apparently, that’s not always the case.
Funny how nostalgia can fade. There was a time when I would have loved to find another 1975, or a very similar 1976 Cordoba, to replace the ’75 I wrecked on an icy stretch of Sunrise Highway on Long Island one December morning in 1987.
This one popped up on Marketplace recently, and my reaction was… meh, whatever. The asking price is $9,800, which might sound high, but a comparable 1976 Chevrolet Monte Carlo or Pontiac Grand Prix—the cars I really, really wanted back in the day—would command at least a third more, if not double, in this condition.
Back then, I really wanted a Monte Carlo, Grand Prix, or even an Oldsmobile Cutlass coupe, but they were out of reach financially. So I bought my ’75 Cordoba on the cheap and convinced myself it was close enough. It was a good deal, and I could do the mental gymnastics required to make it work, even if it wasn’t exactly what I wanted. Besides, it was a seismic upgrade over the dreadful 1974 Mercury Comet it replaced—a car so embarrassingly awful that I joke the Cordoba was really my “second first car.”
I’m all about value, but only to a point. These days, I’ll pay a premium for something I truly want. At the same time, I’m perfectly willing to walk away if it isn’t exactly right, knowing I won’t be satisfied with anything less. There is an upside to getting older: wisdom.
As I slide further along this slippery slope of self-analysis, I’ve come to realize it wasn’t so much the car itself that I longed for, but what it represented—a clean, definitive bookend between the end of my challenging childhood and the beginning of what I hoped would be a wonderful adulthood. If I had truly loved the car for its own sake, that combination of personal meaning and appreciation would have driven me to track down another and keep it for life.
Instead, I’ve arrived at clarity rather than idealization: my Cordoba, sadly, just wasn’t that special to me.
But I’ll tell you this—what I would give to be 19 again, beaming with the same pride of ownership I felt the day I got it.
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