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Cars. What is it about cars that we love so much? I am no psychologist. I can't say with any certainty why other people love cars. I can only articulate why I love them as much as I do. It begins when I was nine years old.
It was Halloween. My mom and dad packed my brothers and me into our gold flecked brown 1976 Monte Carlo and we headed to my grandparents house. The three of us had already sufficiently looted our neighborhood of candy and treats so it was time to loot our grandparent's neighborhood. My mom's parents had a separate neighborhood from that of my dad's and both were separate from ours. It was a Halloween tradition. The three of us would clean out our neighborhood and then tackle the neighborhoods of our grandparents.
The three of us are all dressed up. I was a pirate. My older brother was a cop. My oldest brother was...it was the first and only time he's ever worn a dress...lol. We get to the house of my mom's parents and we all file out of the family car. If you've ever had an old coupe with long doors, sometimes they can droop.
I was the last one out and was charged with closing the door. I closed it. I had a bad habit of grabbing the car door by the edge to close it instead of just pressing on the side. My left index finger got caught in the car door. It was not pretty. I will spare the gory details. I had hand surgery on my finger to re attach my finger tip. One would think that an experience like that with a car would forever destroy my association with them. It was the opposite.
Yes, our Monte Carlo was a piece of shit, but my grandparents' Monte Carlo was SWEET! It rode like feathers on wheels. My grandpa kept that thing in pristine condition. He wouldn't let anyone use that car. He literally bought that car with pennies he had saved up. There is something about riding in a car, or driving a car, that's yours.
Fast forward four years. I'm thirteen now. Raging hormones, embarrassing bodily reactions and a natural awkwardness around the opposite sex basically made me a homebody. I was watching a lot of shows where the car was basically the star of the show: Starsky and Hutch, The Dukes of Hazzard, Knight Rider, Magnum PI, etc. Yes, I know the car was not billed as the star but let's face it. Without The General Lee, The Dukes of Hazzard would have just been a show about moonshiners.
Those shows gave me my first positive image of what a car could be. Who didn't want KITT? Yeah, he was snarky and a know-it-all, but the look of him and the things he could do...I'm not excluding the other famous Firebird featured so prominently in Smoky and the Bandit. This was my childhood, among other things.
The reason I love cars is that no matter how old I get, I can remember all the shapes of the cars I have owned and all the cars that have seen and still remember that I can still be a kid. Do you have any favorite car stories?
