Eric's blog: "A Matter of Lots"

I had to have been 16.  Maybe 17.  Let's just say it was 17 and move on.

I remember seeing her.  Dusty, rusty, tucked away in the handbuilt barn belonging to my uncle.  A ratty, heavy tarp haphazardly covering the hood of the car with various peices of engine debris scattered on it.

I look at the lines, strong but unassuming.  She had been a lovely electric blue at some point in time, but that point in time was not one anyone around could easily remember.  Now she looked...rough.

I later found out she was a 1967 Ford Mustang coupe.  I fell in love right away.  I loved every part of her, and would often sneak and sit in her seat, feeling the aged wood of the steering wheel in my hand and imagining what she and I could do together if she were ever mine.

My uncle had paid the astronomical sum of $1,000 for her, and being 17 and working at a convenience store making $80 a week on a good week, the sum of $1,000 might as well have been a million to me; but that did not stop me from dreaming.

I wondered about her.  How wonderful she must have looked when she hit the streets in 1967.  It very early in the era of "pony cars" and they still caused shockwaves in the streets when they rolled by.  The wonders of iron and wood and cloth surely dropped more than one jaw in their prime.

But that prime was long gone.  A point my parents were quick to bring up whenever I suggested (which I often did) that they should help me buy her.  I just knew in my heart that if she and I were together, that she could be as beautiful as she once was, if not moreso.  When they all looked at her, they saw rust and dirt and a ragged thing past it's prime and not worth believing in anymore.

I believed in her, though.

I was so hurt, and still smart when I think of the day that my uncle told me he had sold the car.  He told me he had decided he would never sell it to me because I was too young and would kill myself in that car.  I was wounded.  I had been so certain that one day she would have been mine.

In fact, it never occured to me that I would not have her one day.  It never occured to me that she and I would part ways and I'd never see her again.  It never occured to me that even though she looked ragged and worn out and beaten to the rest of the world, thatonly I would be able to see through all of that and see a thing which still had it's best days ahead of it and not behind it.

Now, almost 20 years later, I think about her and a few other things that occur to me now that never occured to me then.  It never dawned on me that one day I would be that Mustang and people would be looking at me the same way they looked at her.

It never occured to me.

Until it did.