It’s not my fault. It’s nature and nurture. In my blood and my environment. Cars. Born in Detroit, back when it was the Motor City, child of an engineer who worked for GM (What’s good for General Bullmoose, is good for the USA!).

I vaguely remember a big old Ford way back when but that was an anomaly. From 1960 on it was GM all the way, with Dad trading last year’s car for a new one as one of his employee perks. September meant back to school, plaid dresses and saddle shoes, a fresh box of crayons and the unveiling of the new models. Dad would bring home the brochures and color chips and we’d pour over them for hours, debating the merits or demerits of this tone or that. Then Dad’d go to the dealership and pick out what he wanted. That first one was an Oldsmobile in a lovely spring green, a car my mother still talks about. It had fins, one of the last of that kind, and we sailed it to Florida, a most exotical place for us Northerners, totally wowed by flamingos and palm trees.

Next year though, he came home with a Buick and my mother still talks about that car too. It was a color called Burgundy Mist which might sound elegant but it was basically metallic magenta. Not a decent color for an automobile according to my mom the designer, and certainly not ours.

But my education wasn’t limited to GM cars—I could name ‘em all. When Susie-the-girl-next-door and I got tired of playing Barbie, we’d go sit on the fence and “call cars.” Calling cars, if you’ve never played, consists of craning your neck to see the car coming along and calling out the make, model and year before whoever else is playing. Not something one would imagine ten-year-old girls playing but we were both pretty good. I stayed good through the years too, until they started making Volvos and BMWs and Mercedes that all looked like Hondas, and now with SUVs I’m totally out of the running and glad of it.

Susie and I had our favorites. She was an American car girl—her folks both worked for GM—and she loved those Stingrays. But even then I was foreign car freak, heresy as it was in my GM family. I had a love and hankering for XKEs that stuck with me for years until I actually drove one while my Volvo was being worked on, and the guys who owed the shop convinced me that the English might have great accents but they can’t build a car to save their lives.

In 1963 Dad bought an enormous whale of a Chevy station wagon in a mild-mannered, i.e., boring, metallic gold. We boarded this beast to travel hither and yon about the great Yoo-nited States, from the Upper Peninsula to the Everglades, from the 1964 World’s Fair, to Wild Bill Cody State Park, Montana, affectionately known to us as Mosquito Haven. A few years later, Dad entrusted me to this tank as a novice driver, and I careened through the streets with a half a mile of rattling steel trailing behind me.

As we all got older Dad got more adventurous in his car selections. In 1964 he became the proud owner of an early Pontiac GTO (Gran Turismo Omologato) in a deep teal blue. It was a “three on the tree”—the coolth of a manual transmissions with the uncoolth of it being on the column. He also had a red Oldsmobile 442 which my big brother and his cronies had a rude nickname for that I’d better not repeat because my mom will read this. Dad and I used to go on evening adventures together to the city park where he’d watch baseball and sneak a cigarette and I’d play on the swings. Then we’d go to the Frozen Custard for a cone and he’d let me shift for him on the way home.

After this Dad started trying on the bigger Olds models, the Ninety-Eights that he and Mom grew to love. No Cadillacs though—those were for old people.

But in 1969, when yours truly was a junior in high school and thinking she was just about the cat’s meow, Dad bought a Pontiac Grand Prix and it was a stunner. The front end was twice as long as the rest of the car, it was a metal-flake chocolate brown with, get this—white leather interior. Wow. A coupé—two doors, bucket seats, a console, three-speed automatic—and he actually let me drive this dream machine to school a few times.

I’ve driven and owned many cars since those days, most of them foreign, lots of the them fun. There was a C-Type Porsche that I drove on Pacific Coast Highway endangering my life as well as those around me, a series of Volvos that I souped up with wide wheels and sway bars and a black Mazda MX6 Turbo five-speed that I once got up to a hundred and ten.

Probably my all time favorite car was a sweet little yellow Carmen Ghia convertible in which I sped around the dusty back roads of hilly southern Indiana. When I used to fantasize inheriting a fortune, that was one of the cars I was going to buy, as well as an Avanti, that elusive marvel of Raymond Loewy artwork.
But now I’m working on a program of wanting what I have and that includes my way cool twelve-year-old Honda Accord Coupe. This car is not only a looker, but a great drive, fairly ecological gas-wise, and one of those feats of Japanese engineering that almost never needs repair.

I’m not much of a motor head anymore. I don’t change my own oil, I couldn’t tell you where my feeler gauge is and as I said, I don’t know one SUV from another. My life is pretty much like my car, especially compared to the past—a great drive, fairly ecological and almost never in need of repair.




April 18, 2006
© copyright Maggie Wilson