The things that did matter don’t belong to the car itself as much as to the era, and the man who drove it. Like his car, my grandfather was solid, conservative, and, yes, old, but he managed to make every trip an adventure, and in the process some indelible memories were printed on my brain:

• Sand in the seats: The upholstery was a sort of rip-stop nylon cloth, with stitched ridges that always captured sand. In any other car, it might have been itchy, but in this car it was part of the charm. This was a car that knew the beach, that wasn’t afraid to hold two or three giggling children and their grandmothers, and a cooler with tuna sandwiches and paper napkins equally chilled to perfection. (Chilled paper napkins feel like bliss against sunburned skin.)

• Fishing tackle in the glove box: As the only one of my cousins to spend any great amounts of time with my grandfather, I was the one who went out to the fishermen’s pier and sat on the tackle box, and brought blue fish home for supper. We had matching hats, though he’d cut a hole in mine for my strawberry-blonde pony-tail to poke through. They say fishing is boring, and it might be, if you’re doing it in a lake, but sitting there watching the sailboats come in and out of the harbor, smelling the salt and tar, I was never bored.

• Napkins stolen from Carvel. Carvel is an east coast thing. It’s soft serve ice cream, like Dairy Queen, but better because it comes in vanilla AND chocolate. There’s nothing like sitting in the wide front seat of the old Dodge on a rainy summer day, licking a chocolate ice cream cone (with sprinkles) and watching the windshield wipers swish back and forth.

• Root beer floats. The highway back to Middletown from Sandy Hook has one of the most delightful places on earth: Stewarts. Yes, the very same people that supply the root beer to Cracker Barrel. It’s a true drive in, with trays that clip to the windows, except that the root beer comes in frosted glass mugs, and the fries are crinkle cut, and served in cardboard boats.

• Audible blinkers. The clicking of the turn-signal when it flashed is, to this day, my mental metronome. Regular, with a hint of metal and the ghost of an echo. I never minded when we’d get stuck at the red light by the train tracks coming home from riding camp, because it meant I got to let that steady sound lull me into a restful state that ended the moment we pulled into my grandfather’s gravel driveway.

I don’t remember what happened to that old Dodge. One summer when they met me at the airport my grandfather was driving a station wagon instead, and while the wagon was newer, and more comfortable, it never quite had the magic of the brown car he’d called Lizzie Jane.

Or maybe, just maybe, the real loss of magic was in the fact that I was growing beyond childhood flights of fancy, and the healthy appreciation for crinkle-cut fries and sandy seats.