Vroom

Somewhere along the line, when I was a teenager, I started becoming enamored of cars. Surprising, I know. I'm a male, with a sizable portion of testosterone - and I loved explosions and big guns and jet planes and World War 2. Cars didn't really get their meathooks into me until I was in high school, though, and it happened vaguely independently of any outside input. I just started...noticing them, for some reason.

I can, in fact, point to one probable source of the beginnings of my interest, but to admit it publicly would be shameful to the extreme.

One thing I did was, just upon being driven around as a high schooler (I was young for my grade and did not get my full license until my senior year) was just to notice what was around me. Washington, Pennsylvania is not the most affluent city in the nation. It's not even close. It appears that it is the 2387th most affluent city in Pennsylvania, with a per capita income of $14,818. I nominally lived in East Washington (by about 100 feet) which is 114th, but East Washington is about the size of a thimble. Not even a real thimble, the Monopoly playing piece thimble.

So...what I noticed was a lot of awful, green-colored Chevy Cavaliers (the third generation model), a fair share of Ford Tercels, Geo Metros, and my retired neighbor's Lincoln Town Car (in baby blue). Amidst all the detritus of mid-90's automotive engineering, I eventually became the proud mutual caretaker of one 1989 Buick Le Sabre T Type - oh yes, I had the sporty version. In high school I thought it was an abomination, but I eventually had a fondness for it creep up on me, like a kudzu vine on a particularly immobile stone wall. It was a mid-size car with plenty of room in the back, which was actually a little astonishing to some of my friends who drove Toyota & Honda beaters from the same time period. It also had really low mileage for its age - my grandfather, who bought it, did not drive particularly much, and my father (whom I shared it with) walks to work. Lucky bastard.

It also got around 30mpg, had a V6 with a displacement with the volume of all 4 of a cow's stomachs, and only had one real problem with it in 6 years of driving - the headlights failed coming back at night from a date. We had seen "Phantom of the Opera" (the movie). Not a great movie. An awful date.

Eventually I ripped out the no-longer-functioning tape deck, put in a stereo that could hook up to an iPod, and drove around feeling somewhat like a king. If you use a thing enough, and it has some...element of humanity to it, some customization or design that lends itself to uniqueness instead of ubiquity, then it becomes linked with you and you with it. You use a toothbrush every day - or at least hopefully do - but you wouldn't become attached to it. It's commonplace! Thousands of people have that toothbrush, and yours is indistinguishable from their's. Cars, however, are different - the little things build up.

For the Buick: noone else in my town drove a white '89 Le Sabre. You saw it on the road, it was either myself or my father. From there the flow chart for figuring out who was relatively simple:

It also perpetually had glitter on the passenger seat in the front from my senior prom date. It was impossible to get rid of, even if I had tried very hard. Which I didn't - my will to clean is like my will to resist the clarion call of eating a lemon - nonexistent. 

I mentioned that I ripped out the stereo and replaced it - it was also fairly rare that you would hear Swedish death metal coming from cars with open windows around my town. The knob on the end of the shifter on the steering column was missing - the hood ornament had fallen off - it had metal spoked hubcaps, for reasons unapparent - and both the front windows went up really slowly. 

I drove this car around to almost every long run I did during the summer when I was in college, and it came up here to Massachusetts for the interview that eventually landed me my current job. I personally watched it tick past 150,000 miles (on the way back from a long run). I think it outlasted five girlfriends, five years of track, countless trips to Hendersonville to run when it was sunny, snowing, cold, raining, or bike when I was injured - a good many trips to WashPa's only respectable beer store, Capelli's - car pooling with Matt D. for quite a bit of high school - it was around for my first race ever (a 25 minute 5k, I'm gonna guess - I can't even remember) - and was still around for my last one in college. Its name was Kelly (not by choice! dealership decal on the back).

But all good things must end.