My First Car

Do you remember the heady rush of excitement in owning your first car? I was 18 and mine was a light blue 10 yr old Duster with white racing stripes, I bought it for $400….the color didn’t matter to me because it was “My Car”. The make and model and mileage paled in significance because I had “A Car”!  I was mobile, I was free, I had “arrived”!  I even named it “Cookie”.

But this car did absolutely nothing for my personality or self identification. After a couple of months experience as a new car owner, the glamour died and comments like “what IS that thing?” started registering on my brain, I realized Cookie was an eyesore. And my adolescent logic made the jump that if my car was an eyesore, then I was an eyesore. I started begging rides again and plotted ways to get another car – one that blended in – on my next to nothing budget.

Me and Cookie would sneak onto car lots late at night and browse the long line of possibilities, leaving trails of drool between the tightly packed rows of cars and fingerprints on all the windows. I fell in love with a gleaming brilliant red glossy Jetta and my secret affair began. (Cookie was miserable and started acting out.)  I would stop after work every night to visit her. I’d peer into the driver’s side window to check the mileage to see if she’d been test driven, trying the doors in case she had been unlocked. I’d sit leaning against her brand new tires and sing ballads and told her fantastic stories.  I even memorized her VIN number. I dreamed of where we would go, what I would put on her license plate, maybe even some custom decals. This was MY car, it screamed excitement, passion energy and I knew if I could purchase her, my life would start!  I was motivated, I started working longer hours, saving money…life had purpose!

Two weeks later, she was gone, presumably sold to someone who would never love her like I did...(We’ll pause here for a moment of silence.)  Life was over, I was inconsolable, evidently it didn’t occur to me that there were many other gleaming red Jettas all vying for my attention.

Cookie was vindictively glad, I was heartbroken. I took the $172 dollars I’d managed to save and dropped it in an indigent’s guitar case outside of Strawberry Square in Harrisburg PA.

Looking back 30 years ago…wow, I was an emotional idiot!  Today I still name my cars tho. And I currently have a charcoal Jetta – “Swan”, that is completely paid for…somehow it just seems wrong to think about a red car….speeding across the continent, plates reading “VOLITILE”, sunroof open, windows down, hair streaming in the wind, and the thundering notes of Johnny Horton’s Ballad of New Orleans wrapped in a rocketing red blur…just seems wrong.

PS.  My brother Mark's first car had a dashboard made of "great stuff" foam. It looked like intestines and disintegrated the longer it sat in the sun...so I don't feel like I was the biggest idiot in the family.