Cars - I was sitting here, listening to music and reminiscing about an ex-boyfriend and a road trip we had taken. I remember the radio, and the sunshine coming through the window onto my leg, and the feel of his hand on my thigh, and the rumble of the engine and the peace that I had in that minute to breathe. Then I realized that most of my fond memories of my exes have to do with automobiles in some manner (and some variant on that scene) - the perfect sunny road trip day, the day we got in a fender bender, first car experiences, trips to the mountains, trips to Southern California, trips to Carmel, and last but not least, sex in cars (not the best sex necessarily, but cars do call to mind a certain frenzied, fogging up the windows, furtive urgency). The types of cars vary a bit like the men do - classic roadsters, new roadsters, muscle cars, refined German driving machines, barely running American hoopties.
Some of the road trips have their own soundtracks in my head; funny that somehow going north was always the same CD, and going south was always a different CD, but songs from either call up images of a beautiful day in a bright red machine, riding past suburbia, and the city, over the Golden Gate and off into adventures unknown. All the trips in the red machine weren't happy, some were tinged with sadness knowing that the next day would bring changes we didn't want, but that the trip itself could hold off some of that change for a little while.
Not all the machines were graceful and shiny - some were ugly Ford blue with windows lovingly etched with the names of people we'd never meet going up and down, up and down, faster, faster, over dips in the road until we were laughing too hard to see anymore and someone hit her head so hard that she wasn't having fun anymore while we the rest cried with laughter. The ugliest car of all with 87 different true stories about that no one believes who wasn't there - the "Dukes of Hazzard" incident, the drive to Lake Isabella where we told him SPECIFICALLY not to turn the car off, the Alhambra truck incident, the fire in the trunk incident, the fire in the wiring harness incident. At the time, it was a hate relationship with that first car, but now time has worked its magic and all these incidents have a strangely lovely quality to them. Maybe it's because I now have a car that starts every day, and runs without my having to think about it, that I don't worry about anything catching fire and that I care about where to park it and whether it gets dinged, but I wouldn't appreciate any of these things without that first car, and without the person who taught me to see that car for what it could be.
Here's to my favorite men and their favorite machines - I hope you know how much those times mean to me.
Posted by cshell at August 4, 2003 10:56 PM