Sunny Side Up March 13, 2002 �2002, Kathleen Gibson Remembering those first loves� My friend Gloria�s husband, Les, is practically attached at the hip to his deteriorating 1964 Falcon station wagon. Gloria won�t ride in it or drive it. This should have warned me not to accept his offered ride one day a while back. I slid onto the front passenger seat and fumbled with the antiquated lap belt. Les waited for the click, turned to me with an evil grin and said, �Well, now that you�ve done that, you should know that it�s not fastened in the back.� Then he got busy shifting. I�ve never seen anyone shift quite so. . .earnestly. When things were calm again, Les reached up and placed something on the dash above the steering wheel. I blinked. �I think I saw. . . . I thought I saw. . . .Les, does the gear shift always. . . ?� I began, uncertain whether to bail or bawl. �It�s stripped�won�t stay in at all,� he offered, by way of explanation. But by now I was laughing so hard I could scarcely see out the window. Riding in Les�s old white Falcon reminded me of my first car�a 1963 Dodge. Same period, same color, with a smoky blue interior. The gear changer was a bank of square, silver buttons located to the left of the steering wheel on a panel just below the dashboard. Each button had its own engraved letter. P, D, N, 1, 2, and R. My �baby� was nearly a decade old even then, but I was nuts about those silver buttons. Sometimes I gunned it well and sailed down St. John�s Street�just punching buttons, one after another. I started with D, stopped just before R, and repeated. All the way past City Hall and Cunningham Drugs and up Port Moody Hill into the school parking lot, where I finally hit P. When I left for college Dad sold my pushbutton Dodge for three hundred dollars�an amazing sum, considering how I�d shredded its poor transmission. I thought about that Dodge long after my ride in Les�s chariot, and I guess it was those memories that made me curious about others� first cars. So I asked. The men were especially funny. Their eyes ignited, they bit their bottom lips, and spewed forth specifications worthy of a paid salesman�how many cubic inches in the engine, how many miles on the odometer, the history of the strange clunking sound in the rear assembly, the make and model number of the muffler, and how they never had to change another quart of oil (SX1490, mind) after they bought that new Franz filter. Most recited all this without even hinting if the car was bottle blue, sunset orange, or chartreuse. Ah, those first cars�they leave skid marks on our paths of memory. We learned from them, we loved them, and we laid them by�kind of like most people and their first experiences with faith. Except we talk about the cars. You can respond to this column at [email protected] |
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