Desire

Imagine a box. We will call this box "two thousand dollars," since that is what the average "good used car" was going for back when I was a teenager. Imagine how much money that felt like when I was a teenager. You don't have to imagine the reality of me spending every bit of eight hundred eighty dollars on the Chevrolet Vega that became my (asterisk) first car. The real first car was my brother's truck, which technically wasn't a car, and I got that for being such a good little brother and then I dropped it off a cliff. But that's another story.
Now, imagine another box. This one will be called "ten thousand dollars," since that is how much "good used cars" are going for in the circulars that show up attached to our weekly newspaper. Imagine, if you will, that my son would like his first car to be of the eight hundred fifty dollar variety. Thirty-five years later, my son would like to undercut his father's purchase price on his first car by thirty dollars.
Now imagine my chagrin. That takes up a pretty fair sized box. When my son further announced that the car he had in mind was "a bit of a gas guzzler," I flinched again.
"What does your mother think of this?" I queried, keeping in mind that his mother was the inventor of the "Homemade Hybrid." I understood my son's predilection toward high performance sports cars, but I hadn't imagined that his wish for wheels would take him to this place. Would my son, who owns dozens of Lamborghinis, Maseratis, and innumerable exotic foreign automobiles in the virtual world of video games, let his first car be a "beater?"
Then I remembered being seventeen, and the lure of the open road. Being able to drive to places where my friends would hang out, ready to give me grief about the Vega I was driving. But it didn't matter. What mattered was that it was mine and it had four decent tires and a stereo that worked. It was my car. I drove to my high school graduation in that car. Eventually, it met the same essential fate of my previous first car, when the aluminum engine block warped to the point where I could not put oil in it fast enough. I used to keep a couple quarts of oil in the back, just in case.
My son knows better, but his encyclopedic knowledge of motor vehicles will not let him rise above his absolute need for something for him to drive. Now. I'll keep trying to reason with him. Maybe we can talk him all the way up to the thousand dollar range. Maybe the sellers will even throw in a free case of oil.