Right now, there’s a good chance you’re planning the perfect Mother’s Day for your wife or mom. If that’s the case, I wish you good luck and I thank you for taking time out of your schedule to check out this week’s edition of Car Connections. I had the Random Word Generator give me three words, and then I linked them to cars in some way. This week’s words are hammer, face, and deteriorate. How would you associate these words with cars? Tell us in the Comments section below.

Hammer: For obvious reasons, my mind goes to construction right away. And for decades, my dad’s mind has done the same thing. Back in the early 2000s, he bought a 1993 Toyota Pickup Xtracab 4×4 with the legendary 22R-E 2.4-liter I-4 and five-speed manual gearbox from a neighbor. He promptly made it look much cooler and tougher by adding aluminum wheels, BFGoodrich KO2s, and chrome mirror caps. My dad may have dressed his truck up, but he used it to work. He drove it to and from his office during the week, and to get building supplies for his never-ending home improvement projects. Every few months, he would drive it about three hours from metropolitan Austin to Corpus Christi to make repairs on our old house and prepare it for new renters. My dad must have put about 100,000 miles on that truck, which already had an odometer that stopped in the six-digit realm before he bought it.

I remember one time he loaded the bed with so much drywall that he thought he finally destroyed the engine (I thought he did too!). We were both wrong; after he replaced the water pump, it kept on going. That truck was a great example of Toyota reliability! It even held up while I was secretly using it to teach myself how to drive stick (sorry, Dad!).

Face: I know I’m probably decades late to this party but, just the other day, I realized the first-generation (aka “NA”) Mazda MX-5 Miata has a happy “face.”

The wide opening in the front bumper is its mouth. The eyes are open to interpretation. The turn signals can be seen as eyes that give the Miata a cartoonish face. But raise the pop-up headlights and you have round, more human-like eyes. Either way, the Miata looks as if it’s having a good time, which is what most people (my hand is definitely raised) have behind the wheel.

Deteriorate: My wife bought her 2013 Volkswagen Beetle brand-new after she graduated college. Her goal was to pay it off in five years, then keep it for another five — she accomplished her goal. In that time, she used it to move from El Paso to Austin, and commute to and from her first post-college job. She even let me drive it on one of our first dates: a James Bond double-feature (“Goldfinger” and “Quantum of Solace”) at a drive-in movie theater.

When my wife sold her Beetle, it had well over 100,000 miles. There were age-related signs of wear, such as the metallic foil on the driver’s interior door handle coming off, but her black V-Tex leatherette seats didn’t really deteriorate — they managed to stay rip- and tear-free. Too bad the white leather seats in her Mazda CX-5 aren’t as durable.