The House Of Seven...Volvos

If Life is Learning, one of the things I have Learned is that They stop making the things you like. Several years ago, the heirs of Dr Bronner, be they cursed forever and fall victim to incurable diaper rash, changed the soap I had used for twenty-five years, ruining it, and forcing me to Find Something Else. In 1992, L.L.Bean stopped making the pants I had worn for years, on the very eve of our first trip to China, and there I was, believing I would be heading to the other side of the world with all my pants in shreds and tatters, until, at nearly the very last moment before we headed to the Mysterious East, I found a source for substitute pants in Boston.
But the worst shock was a year and a half later, when upon our return to Maine in the midst of the coldest and snowiest winter we have ever had here, I discovered that Volvo had stopped production of its 240 series cars, vehicles that I felt were the epitome of automotive marvelousness.
We had two at the time, the 1988 wagon we had bought new and fetched from the factory in Gothenburg following our trip to Israel for Rachel's sister's wedding, and the 1986 sedan that we bought in 1991 when Louis was born.
For a time we limped along with just those two. Well, quite a time-- about a decade in fact.
Then I came to the realization that we needed to Prepare For The Future. Volvo was never going to make rear wheel drive cars again, and I was never going to drive front wheel cars. I was 45, and hoping that it was about Mid-Life Time, if not earlier. It was 2002 and the newest 240s were nearly ten years old. Did I, I asked, want to be looking for replacement cars in ten or fifteen or twenty years? No, I answered. What should I do, I asked myself? Prepare, I answered!
And so we began (okay, so it's an editorial "we") Our Quest-- an Automotive Acquisition Campaign. The Goal: to assemble a fleet of twelve operable 240s and a group of parts cars. This would, I felt, enable us to send off each of the boys into the World with a decent, albeit slightly aged, vehicle, and leave us enough cars to see us well into our elderlyness.
In retrospect I see that I should have limited myself to one car per color, or one car per model year, but it's too late for that, and model years and colors aren't the point. The point is to have a working fleet, and we are well on the way. We have Martin's red sedan (1984), the mostly green 1980 former wagon that is now our truck, the white 1987 wagon, the white 1991 wagon, the blue 1986 wagon, and the two aforementioned vehicles, still well running daily drivers, mostly.
Parts cars we have made a good start on as well. There's the wrecked red sedan in our driveway, the blue wagon in the back yard, the white wagon at the auto body shop, another wagon hidden in a garage across town, and a blue sedan next to said garage.
There is a substitute available, actually-- a very similar car. Made with front engine, rear wheel drive, similar capacity, very safe, but sold in the US only with automatic transmissions, and at an unviable cost--$50,000 a pop. So no Mercedes E320s for us. We shall stick with Volvo 240s and drive happily, though perhaps not very rapidly, into the future. It's hard to be pure, but standards must be maintained. In the unforgettable words of the noble Galaxy Quest crew--"Never give up--never surrender!"