Not long thereafter, we packed everything we owned (mainly unopened wedding gifts) into the back of Nana's '63 Valiant and drove cross-country 3,000 miles from Seattle to Princeton, New Jersey. For three winters, we drove it on ice-covered streets. Every summer, we piled into the car and drove 3,000 miles back, where I did beach ministry in Southern California. At the end of the summer, we would drive another 3,000 miles back to Princeton. We had that car all through the early years of our marriage.

Finally, I bought a new car. Because the dealer would not give us anything for the Valiant, I dropped it off at my parents' home, where it was given to my sixteen-year-old kid brother, who painted it yellow, jacked up the rear end, and put racing wheels on it -- which looks ridiculous on a Valiant. His friends told him so; and he hated that car. He tried to destroy it. He would take it out on lonely roads and rev it up to 8,000 RPM's and then put it in gear. He couldn't kill it. Finally, he went away to college -- mainly to get away from the car. My mother got the car and painted it gray. For years she drove the car to school where she taught third grade.

Well, Nana died; we had children; and as they started to grow, I said to my daughters, "Have I got a car for you!" In the mid-1990's, I got a phone call from my mom. She said, "Vic, are you sitting down?" I said, "Yeah, Mom." She said, "Well, Vic, today the Valiant died." It was like losing an old friend.

Isn't it interesting how we bond with physical objects that are familiar to us? I'm not talking about an expensive piece of jewelry or a priceless art collection. I'm talking about that old hunting jacket your wife has been trying to throw away for years. I m talking about the closet containing all those yellowed letters you dig through like some sort of archaeologist, refusing to discard a single precious scrap of paper. Or that plastic angel that has been on the top of your Christmas tree since you were tiny. We bond with material things and they become more than things: they become a part of us.

If we bond with things, how much more do we bond with people -- people we have known for thirty or fifteen or ten years? In fact, we even put a special prefix in front of those people's names sometimes. We say, "Good old Aunt Bertha." She always gives you a tie for Christmas. You put it in the back of the closet and never wear it. Or, "Good old Uncle Charlie with his wacky sense of humor." He cracks us up every Christmas dinner. "Good old Vic -- he goes up into that pulpit, rain or shine, Sunday after Sunday."

C. S. Lewis says that it is no compliment to be loved with affection. All you have to do is hang around a while. He says:

Almost anyone can be an object of affection: the ugly, the stupid, even the exasperating. There needs to be no apparent fitness between those whom it unites. It can exist between a clever young man from the university and an old nurse, though their minds inhabit different worlds. It ignores even the barriers of species. We see it not only between dog and man, but more surprisingly, between dog and cat. Gilbert White claims to have discovered it between a horse and a hen.