There was practically nothing left of that car.

It was a 1993 Celica driven like a maniac; I had the driving record to prove it. If that weren’t proof enough, the driver side — noticeably sideswiped from bumper to bumper — would seal the deal.

The first few years I had the car occurred not long after the first “Fast and the Furious” movie was released and I joined the throng of 18–22-year-olds interested in making small cars faster than small cars. I treated it like gold; I washed it practically every day and avoided water, potholes, snow and whatever riddled the roads of Western New York State.

But one night not long after I made my last $135 monthly payment on the loan I went too fast around a curve on a dirt road and ended up in a forest. When a friend’s dad towed it out the next morning, it was a pale reflection of the masterpiece I’d adored … but it still drove as long as I added gear lube to the leaking transmission (or gear box — I have no idea of its proper name) every few weeks.

Perfect vehicle to transport me 700 miles south for college, right?

I DROVE THE CELICA my first two years of college until the damaged transmission finally gave in one morning on my way to the job I worked through school. The owner of that ice cream shop sold me a 1997 Chevrolet Lumina.

I knew I hadn’t had a valid driver license in years. Speeding tickets, unsafe start tickets, reckless driving tickets, window tint tickets and failure to (insert whatever you want here) tickets just become annoying after a while and you stop paying them ... or at least, that’s what I did. That made it challenging to register a vehicle in North Carolina, but it was possible to transfer the Celica’s New York registration to the Lumina.

I’m sure New York State had some type of warrant for my arrest, but it wasn’t a big enough deal for North Carolina authorities to arrest me, I always figured. And I lived in a decent-sized city; cops don’t sit and shoot radar like they do in the area of small communities I was from. I was pretty sure I would be absolutely screwed if I ever had an accident with the car, but I was willing to take this chance rather than address things legitimately.

A few years after I graduated from college, I was working as a crime reporter when a Lenoir County, NC, sheriff’s deputy pulled me over in town. I thought this was strange because by then I had become a model citizen behind the wheel of my plain-looking family sedan … and deputies in the Carolinas generally don’t do traffic stops.

“Justin, you need to tell me right now what is going on with this car,” he said, knowing me from my routine stops at the sheriff’s office for work duties. “It has a New York license plate but an old North Carolina inspection sticker.

“And when I run the tags, it comes back to you but I know you don’t live in New York State.”

I remember feeling bad I wasn’t being completely truthful with someone I knew on a borderline personal level, but I did what I had to do. He was going to find the truth anyway; I might as well play dumb.

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve just never taken the time to transfer everything to this state.”

As he walked back to his car with my license, I began gathering my necessary belongings from the car, preparing to be told I would not be driving home that night. If I were lucky, I wouldn’t end up in jail.

“Justin, I ran your license,” he said. “Your license isn’t just suspended; it’s been revoked.

“What the Hell is going on?”

So I told him the story.

And I asked for mercy.

“You’re going to go home tonight,” he said. “You’re going to call into work tomorrow and you’re going to spend the day paying all of these fines so you can get your New York license reinstated so you can get it transferred to North Carolina.

“Then you’re going to do the same thing with your vehicle registration.”

He assured me I would be going to jail if he saw me driving the Lumina again with New York State plates.

ONE DAY AND MY ENTIRE CHECKING ACCOUNT balance later, I was back on the road … legally for the first time in six years. With a license in a new state, my driving record was completely unblemished.

While it lifted a huge burden from me, more significantly, it erased the last remnant of a reminder I was once a carefree, wild kid.

Would I have followed his instructions four years earlier? Hell no. I would have just quit my job and moved to another town so the process could repeat itself. That’s the beauty of not owning a home, not having a wife and not having a job that’s any better than whatever’s down the road. You have that kind of freedom.

But that kind of freedom wasn’t on my mind as I sat at my kitchen table to call those courts in obscure Western New York town and pay all of those tickets. Getting my 2-year-old daughter to wherever she needed to be was all I worried about.

KALISTA TURNS 16 TODAY and I don’t understand where all this time has gone. It was just yesterday I was saying prayers with her at night in her big girl bed in the master bedroom of the two-bedroom cottage I rented for us in Kinston. I can still hear the tiny voice she had before her tonsils were removed.

I remember her “flapping her wings” as she pouted while strapped into her booster seat at the kitchen table because I told her she had to eat her vegetables; I would sit nearby at the table, watching the news and pretending to be unmoved (but, really, it killed me).

I remember riding my bike with her in a seat over the back wheel around New Bern, NC, where we lived in another apartment before I got my first reporting job in Kinston. She still talks about the time she decided to kick off one of her princess shoes in the middle of a busy intersection and how I got it back for her. There in New Bern, we’d go to the waterfront with a half-loaf of old bread and feed the ducks for hours at a time. If there were vendors at the uptown market, we’d stop and check them out.

I have all of these feelings like they were just yesterday, like the day I told my first real boss I would be raising my daughter alone and him reminding me I didn’t make enough money to even support myself and asking “how I planned to do that.” I had no idea … but I was going to do it.

Kalista has always made parenting something I feel truly blessed to do. It is a privilege not everyone gets. It doesn’t take away the freedom I once had, it gives it an upgrade. There’s nothing remarkable about a guy with responsibilities he keeps within his control; honoring responsibilities that pertain to another life is the true accomplishment. And if you love that other life enough, you don’t even realize your own responsibilities might have taken a hit because that other life is taken care of and that is all that matters.

SO TODAY, ON THIS girl’s 16th birthday, I celebrate her sincerely. She has given me the gift of love, freedom and maturity. In her, I see similarities to myself as a 16-year-old boy and I find it absolutely terrifying … but I also see signs of the woman she’s becoming and believe these will cancel out one another.

For she has that heart that wants to take in every stray cat we see.

She has that talk that seems like it will never die on a long car ride but I really miss after she falls asleep against the window.

She has those eyes that still get big whenever I tell her my blood sugar is low and she scrambles to find something for me to treat it.

She has that love I sense when she makes someone a bracelet and hands it to them.

“Here you go,” she says, like it’s no big deal. “I made this for you.”

And it sounds just like it did when she was 4 and would say that about a picture she drew.

I worry about her, pray for her and I cry for her; I want her future to be bright and for her to somehow learn from the mistakes I made at her age. I want everything for her, but most of all I just want her to be happy.

I want her to feel everything she has made me feel for 16 years.

Happy birthday, Kalista.