Last week at Nori’s, after a hard day of hanging out, swilling coffee and swapping lies, I went out to my car and — Lo and Behold! — there was a note under one of my windshield wipers.

For a very long moment I just stared at it, dumbfounded — I couldn’t remember the last time someone had left me a note, let alone on my windshield.

But what could it be?

A billet doux from a secret admirer? Possible … but not probable.

An authentic pirate map, with X marking where Blackbeard had buried his treasure? Fanciful … and likely fallacious.

Or maybe the Enterprise publisher had finally come to his senses and was letting me know he’d submitted my name for a Pulitzer? If life was fair, that would’ve been a definite. Unfortunately, as we know all too well, life is NOT fair.

Having eliminated all the unlikely possibilities, I did what anyone with a shred of common sense would’ve done from the get-to: I opened the note and read it.

All my surmises were wrong. No romance, no pirate treasure, no literary honors.

Instead, it was a note from what I assumed is a young person telling me they’d backed into my car. And while they didn’t think they’d caused any damage, just in case they had, they left their name and contact info.

I stood there in disbelief.

Then I reread the note. Yep, I’d gotten the details right the first time.

But what was so unbelievable about that note? Just that someone was responsible enough to write it.

I’ve needed bodywork done on that car twice — EXPENSIVE bodywork at that. Both times the damage was done when my car was parked. And both times the gonif who plowed into it took off without so much as a fare-thee-well (May their house be cursed, unto perpetuity).

Sadly, this seems to be the common reaction. Wayne Darrah, the Bey of Bodywork, said in years past, someone’d bring in a car that’d been anonymously mashed, maybe once a month. These days, it’s once a week. Anecdotal statistic-taking? Perhaps. Insight into a societal trend? More than likely.

It seems Phantom Non-Mender Fender Benders now grow on trees, along with all sorts of other inconsiderate, anti-social types. Nationally, an ethos of mutual respect seems to have gone the way of the pince nez and whalebone corset. Maybe I’m only saying that because I’m so old I can remember the time before road rage and mass shootings became national pastimes.

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Rusty but unbowed

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But forget the country at large; let’s talk about my beleaguered car. What was the result of its latest mishap? Before I get to that, lemme give you some vital background.

My car is a 17-year-old Honda Accord with almost 200k miles on it. I got it when it was four years old and it was a beauty. It’d been a lease car and had been scrupulously maintained. It had no dents or scratches and nary a speck of rust. The interior was immaculate and it was mechanically and electronically perfect. Thirteen years, 13 ADK winters, and 160 thou miles later, the model name could be more fairly changed from Accord to DIScord.

First, the CD player bit the dust; then the radio followed suit. The more mileage on the odometer, the worse mileage on the gas gauge. Luckily, it doesn’t leak oil. UNluckily, it burns it, to the tune of about a quart and a half every thousand miles or so. The front seat passenger window works or doesn’t, depending on the weather and the window’s whims. The driver’s door refuses to lock under any circumstances, and it won’t close completely when the mercury hits zero. The dome light stopped working when I did, about 10 years ago. And the upholstery, after years of being “paw painted” by my canine charges, looks only a little better than it smells.

As for the body, the putative subject of this column? Let’s just say it has paid its dues … and it looks it. While it hasn’t hit the duct tape and zip tie stage, it’s not too far away. It has more chips out of it than soup kitchen china, and if Neil Young is wrong, and rust DOES sleep, in my car’s case it also sleepWALKS. Whenever I turn a corner, I hear more creaks, cracks and crunches than at BOGO Day at the chiropractic college. And it has scratches, scrapes and dents galore.

But while the car looks scrofulous, it’s is functional and it gets me where I want to go, plus it’s had a great repair record. If you like metaphors, I’d say if my car were human, it’d be Keith Richards.

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Ya just gotta poke around

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Background over, what about the note and what lay behind it?

I checked the car for a new ding, and for obvious reasons, it took a while to find it. Finally I did — it was a fairly good-sized dent on my driver’s side front fender. It wasn’t big enough to touch the wheel when I turned, so my only concern would have been its appearance — if I’d been concerned. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t. I thought of that dent like I do my most recent liver spot — just another “So what?” Certainly not worthy of my concern or even attention. Matter of fact, I thought it added a note of downscale dignity, kinda like what’s euphemistically labeled my “laugh lines.”

So I did the only thing that made sense: I emailed the kid and told them not to worry, that my car was on its last legs (or if they preferred, its last tires), and one more dent didn’t make no nevermind. I also told them how much I appreciated the note and their being considerate enough to leave it. And let’s face it, I’d have to be a complete schmuck to raise the kid’s insurance premium.

By the way, you might wonder why I thought the note writer was young? Maybe I’m wrong, but after having read tens of thousands of 18 to 22-year-olds’ handwritten essays, homeworks, quizzes, notes and everything else that involves pens on paper, I believe I’ve developed an ability to spot young people’s penmanship and phrasing. I mean, it ain’t rocket surgery.

But the most important thing about the note, the kid, and the dent has nothing to do with the car. Instead, it has to do with young people in general and my attitude toward them.

Simply put, if I don’t check myself, my default state about young people is the classic Old Fart’s Over-generalization, namely they ain’t half the men (or women) we were. It doesn’t matter what the issues are, but if they concern peeps 50 years younger, all too many of my peers (including me, unfortunately) just dismiss them out of hand. We’ve all heard and seen those dismissals — matter of fact, when I was a 20-something, I heard more than my share of them — directed at me and my peers.

But the note I got from that kid is clear proof there are indeed great young people out there. And they’re doing all kinds of constructive and artistic things that I tend to ignore. Best of all, “out there” is also “right here,” since we have lots of them in My Home Town. If you haven’t seen any, you just haven’t poked around. And at the same time, age bias being what it is, I conveniently forget there are boatloads of peeps my age who are zugs who’ve given up on doing much of anything, or are just lousy role models.

So, ultimately, I owe a lot to the kid who smacked into my car. They not only gave me a new dent for my collection, but some invaluable new insights as well.