At 7:45 p.m. July 8, an old Chevy was parked on 15th Street under the eastbound lanes of I-480 in downtown Omaha, Neb.

At 11:45 p.m., it was not.

“911. What’s your emergency?”

“My car’s been stolen!” I said in between sobs.

I told the dispatcher the important information, and then I called my parents.

“Hello!” Dad said in a cheery voice. He had been expecting my brother to call from Philadelphia.

“Someone stole the car!”

Of the things that change a parent’s demeanor 180 degrees, that was one of them.

After I told them everything (or at least tried to), I went out and waited 20 minutes for the police to show up. We went to where I had left the car. Broken glass where the right side of my car should have been was all that was left, except for the keys in my pocket.

Many people tried to comfort me. They told me that often cars are taken for joyrides and then abandoned, found after a few days. Joyrides? What kind of sick, lawless jerks would break into someone’s car and take it on a joyride?

After a month and a half in Omaha, the city had finally imposed its cruel reality on an Iowan farm boy.

Cliche as it might be, it’s true. Where I come from, you can park the car, leave the window down, go inside for 10 minutes, come back out and get in your car without any problems. There’s no fear that it won’t be there — the unlocked car is not the exception.

Mom and Dad tried to cheer me up by saying “It’s an old car.” Sure, it was an old car. But it was my car. Parting with it was supposed to be done on my terms, not some thief’s.

Technically, it was not my “first” car. That distinction belongs to its older sibling, a 1981 diesel Chevy. However, it gave up the ghost completely three months after I began driving it to school.

For practical purposes, my first car was originally owned by my grandmother. She took good care of it, using it rarely, driving to the store and back. Probably that and the fact she always had it in the garage meant no second thoughts when she picked a car in dark maroon.

There might not have been anything wrong with that — except that the air conditioner died a long time ago. Thus, leaving it outside for any amount of time between early April and late September caused the interior to be nearly intolerable when you got back in. I worked up a sweat just driving to work that last day.

In its last six months, my car went farther and did more than it had in a long time. It visited four states and 60 of Iowa’s counties — Fremont to Chickasaw, Clay to Appanoose. The odometer read about 127,570 the last time I saw it — an eighth of a million miles for one car under one family.

Unlike other cars from its time in existence today, the bottom half wasn’t splotched with rust, perhaps a testament to spending so much time on roads that didn’t get salted. The front bumper was askew from when another driver and I tried to leave our parking spaces at the same time. The frame in front of the right tire was bent in, and the left side mirror was broken. But overall, for a car eight years from being deemed a classic, it was in pretty good shape.

Maybe that’s why they took it. Today, I’m not even sure it’s intact; its demise in a chop shop, split up and sent to places unknown, seems a valid possibility.

Like most things, a price can be put on it. According to Kelley Blue Book, that’s under $1,800. But to me, it was priceless.

My car was my one constant throughout six years of change; it was always there for me. A family car left unlocked countless times in small Iowa towns, once used for vacations, even to Chicago and back, only to be taken from an otherwise empty street on a hot July evening in Omaha.

To whoever took my car: I hope you enjoy tooling around Omaha in your stolen, hotwired property with Iowa plates. I hope the breeze from the broken window makes up for the broken air conditioner.

All you stole was a 1986 Chevrolet Caprice Classic — and more than 32,500 miles of my memories.