Baby You Can Drive My Car

Pity my poor son. Born and raised in California, he is in love with his automobiles. When he was very young, we all wondered when his fixation on trains would end. We now recall those days of glassy eyed rail fascination with great fondness. I would read his old copies of "Car and Driver," if I could find the time. I want to share in his enthusiasm, since he has plenty, but I haven't quite managed the focus of an eleven-year-old.
There was a moment or two when I had a vision of the car I would own one day. That was when I was fifteen. "Star Wars" had just come out, and envisioned a Chevy van painted with X-Wing and Tie fighters swarming around a doomed Death Star. It wasn't about the make or model. I have no idea why I fixated on "Chevy." It was all part of the plan, along with the extensive airbrush mural that I would be creating with my lack of experience and equipment. And for months I pined for this potential vehicle, while real life continued.
In the end, the first car I bought was a Chevy. It just turned out to be a copper-colored Vega. No shag carpet or dome windows, and the paint job was entirely factory awful. It was during the first few years of having a driver's license that I actually enjoyed being behind the wheel. I learned to change, or in the case of the oil-burning aluminum block of the Vega, to add oil as necessary, and eventually to change the occasional spark plug. Other than that, the maintenance of that car was left strictly to filling it with gas as needed.
As I said, I enjoyed driving in those days. I enjoyed it so much that I regularly drove my other friends who did not have their own cars around. I even took a few of them out with their dates, and then sat staring out into the middle distance, listening to the cassette player while they played slap and tickle in the back seat. The one thing I did manage to make happen in the car of my reality was the stereo of my dreams, with four speakers, AM-FM, and graphic equalizer. When you rode in my car, it was loud. Partly to cover up the sounds coming from under the hood.
For me, cars have generally been the transportation that I could afford, and always a place where I can play the music as loud as I want. The fact that I ride my bike to and from work doesn't feel like much of a compromise, since I now own a house where I can play the music as loud as I want - when my wife lets me. But my son still pines for sports cars and high performance machines that he can lovingly describe, feature by feature. All of this while the American auto industry is going in the tank, and his parents try to get him to reconcile his beliefs with the hope of a hybrid or hydrogen fuel cell. These are the cars he wants. They probably won't be the cars he ends up with, but I hope he always has something to dream about.
Tomorrow we're all heading out to the fifty-first annual International Auto Show in San Francisco. We will be taking public transportation. Dreams die hard.