My grandfather is truly a product of the Depression. He’s a millionaire who has never paid full price for anything, buys milk in bulk when it’s on sale and then freezes it, and, like the Rain Main, gets all his underwear at K-Mart.

He’s the guy who holds up the line at the supermarket to go over his six-hundred line item receipt, find a flaw, and then explain very slowly to the disinterested cashier that he was overcharged $.07 for the bulk prunes. Oh, and Dr. Scholl’s Fungicidal Nipple Strips were on sale today, but it’s not showing up, and the only reason he’s buying the damned antifungal nipple strips is that they’re such a good deal right now; much better than at the supermarket down the road that practically reaches into your pockets and pulls money out by the pound in exchange for fungicidal nipple strips. Is this supermarket turning criminal like all the other ones in the neighborhood? Next you’re going to say that millionaires shouldn’t be allowed to pay for their antifungal nipple strips with Social Security money and food stamps. Well, humph.

By far, though, my grandfather is at his Depression era best when at the auto dealership. For a man who’s so cheap that he’d probably try to buy used staples, or even sit around until the wee hours of the night bending random pieces of metal into staple-shaped bendy metal things to make the staples himself, he is a force to be reckoned with on the blacktop of any establishment where vehicles are sold.

To wit, he began negotiations in 1978 for the purchase of a slightly used Buick Skylark.

Those negotiations continue to this day.

They’re on the precipice of becoming generational. There are probably notes in my grandfather’s will on how he’d like the talks to continue, whom to pass them on to – which child is the most responsible and most able to carry the torch. I expect the sale to be finalized sometime between now and the total depletion of worldwide oil reserves, at which time the car will be completely worthless (until it gets converted to run on pig manure).

Anyway, whatever happens, everybody can pretty much rest assured that the responsibility of signing the bill of sale won’t go to my father. Like cleft chins, car finance intelligence seems to skip a generation.

There was a period during my father’s life when he combined boredom, alcohol, and an epic gift for irresponsibility to, like a bad magician, turn money into nothing. He had made a habit of driving by auto dealerships on the way home from work to see if they had anything he wanted. They usually did. And then he’d buy whatever it was. It all happened so quickly that I don’t think he even stopped half the time to get out of his original car. He’d just roll by, drop some huge money bags into a bucket that a dealer rep would collect, someone would hand him the keys to the new car, and then he’d tuck and roll out onto the tarmac and right into the new car smell of his latest purchase

I got used to seeing him arrive home with a different car than the one he drove to work in that same morning.

Although it was routine after a while, I still liked to ask things like, “I just talked to you on the phone at the office twenty minutes ago – how did you get a new car between now and then?”

He would explain that all he had to do was give his old car to the dealership, write them a check for $14,000, and agree to pay off the balance at the rate of $800 a month for the next seventy-two months (the auto dealers gave him “special” interest rates on loans). No problem. Then he’d chuck an empty beer can at my head and disappear into the night after laying a patch of melted rubber on the street. Yee-haw.

It was through a succession of such events that my father, over the course of roughly ten years, finally managed to purchase a Ford Focus for $93,000.

I think it’s safe to say that my father will not receive the Buick Skylark negotiations family heirloom.

In related news, I learned a very important lesson yesterday.

I have a new Mini Cooper (a CooperWorks S model) arriving in the next few days, and I needed to unload my old Mini. It was a 2003 with 26,000 miles, had been in an accident, had large scuffs on the wheels, and I sold it in less than twenty-four hours.

Here’s the good part.

I bought it in 2002 (in December – I got my hands on an early 2003 model) for about $21,000. I sold it yesterday for about $19,000.

Do the math, yo.

I drove a Mini Cooper for nearly three years, and it cost me roughly $60 a month.

The lesson I learned yesterday is that, when selling something, try to sell something that people want. It makes the job so much easier.

It also puts you in line to finish negotiations on a 1978 Buick Skylark if you’re lucky enough to be a member of the Blyth family.

Woo-hoo.