Recently the airbag warning light in my car turned on. I tried the old standard fix (putting black tape over the light) but with my Parkinson’s tremors, this turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. As an aside, I’m talking about the Airbag warning light. This should not be confused with the Windbag warning light, which warns you when you have a passenger who won’t shut the Hell up. As if you wouldn’t notice that on your own.

I’ve had this car for nearly a decade now, and it’s got over 108,000 miles on it. To me, this means it has reached that special age when I start to evaluate how much a repair is going to cost, versus how much longer I want to keep this car. If the airbag light had come on 20,000 miles ago, I would have taken it to the shop and gotten it fixed right away. But now I find myself thinking…Do I really need working airbags? Suppose I just try not to crash. Or wear a football helmet while I’m driving. I think either of these approaches would provide the same additional safety as an airbag.

On the other hand, I feel like this car has a lot more value left in it than my previous cars did. It still runs great, doesn’t have any rust, doesn’t make (many) unexplained noises. So I might be able to squeeze a lot more life out it. And with the used car market as it is right now, I know this won’t be another case of settling for a one hundred dollar trade-in value, like I did with my 1987 Chevy Celebrity. On the other side of the other hand, that Celebrity never complained about its airbags. In fact there was one thing about that old Chevy that I really miss: it had a detachable dashboard that I could hand over to whatever passenger I might have. This tended to leave my passengers speechless…even the windbags.