Vehicle of Expression

According to some people, an automobile is just a vehicle to get from A to B. For me it’s much more than that – it’s the whole driving experience. I don’t really know for sure how many different cars and trucks I have driven. I can remember with reasonable certainty all that were titled in my name, but all those owned by employers and friends – well, I can’t be sure. It may be close to 100.

Ever since that June day in 1975 when Mom and Dad drove off in the Buick and left the keys to the ‘66 Mercury, I have been hooked on driving. I don’t quite understand all the mechanics involved, but I appreciate the feel of a steering wheel, the response of an accelerator and the sound of a powerful engine.

But I still haven’t found the perfect vehicle. I’ve been close several times, but things change, and you move on. After I got my license Dad bought a Chevette as a second car for the family. It was more of a go-kart than a car.

Mom used it for getting groceries; I used it for getting in trouble. My position prevents me from sharing all matters of mischief, but when my friends and I looked for trouble this little car took us there.

In college I had four different cars. The first was a faded ’66 Galaxie 500. The body was indestructible, but the block cracked on a cold January night. That was replaced by a brown ’73 Bel Air (I can not for the life of me remember what happened to that great car). Next was a ’73 Lesabre with a hood so large that the sky disappeared when it ascended a hill. The frame cracked on a warm July afternoon when a truck ran into it.

The fourth car, the one that became “our car,” was a dependable 1980 Skylark. Rhonda and I put a lot of miles on that car until it finally got too tired and quit. As part of her dowry, Rhonda contributed a ’74 Mustang with a standard transmission. Both our children got their very first car ride in an ‘84 Cavalier station wagon.

Some time during those early years I discovered Dad was right when he said, “you can always use a pick-up.” For the next twenty years a truck, sometimes two, was stabled in a barn or a shed. There was the yellow ‘71 Chevrolet with a bench seat where a little girl could sit next to her dad; an ’86 Ford (with two jump-seats for two kids; a ’69 F250 farm truck with a “granny” gear; “Pipes,” a short-box ’96 Ford that growls when the pedal is pushed, and two Fords with four doors each (just in case we had to haul the whole crew).

Somewhere in the middle of all this we had “Mr. Breeze.” That was a ’66 Chrysler hard-top who got its name one day when we pulled both vents open and rolled down all the windows. There was a Jeep CJ that took five little boys on an open-air birthday adventure, and a red Cherokee that was destroyed by a deer. We also had a Caprice, an affordable family-car that my brother-in-law, Rich, got for us when he worked at a car dealer.

There were others: a Chevy conversion van we sold when the color became too much for us to bear, a ’74 Dodge motor home which gave us lots of memories and settings for camper plays, and a Buick with bad shocks that turned its passengers into bobble heads.

Even when Rhonda was satisfied with her “family,” vehicles (including the Expedition she drives now) I had a couple two-seater sport cars, but the gravel road finally won out and I sold them. My brother Dan’s VW bug sits in the barn patiently waiting for attention. Some day I will work on the car, but in the meantime I will keep looking for that perfect vehicle.

I may not have driven 100 cars yet, but this is my 100th column. This may be just the vehicle to express myself from A to Z.