My first car (the first car that was considered to be mine) was a 1970 something Subaru, not unlike this:
Mine was blue. And not this fancy. But same basic idea. It is what I graduated to after initially learning to drive on my parents ENORMOUS green suburban. In point of fact, I failed my first driving test because I was not able to properly parallel park the thing. Which, did I mention, was ENORMOUS?
Anyway, I eventually got my license and after 6 months or so of driving the family suburban with no accidents, my dad found the Subaru in a used lot for something like $300. I thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. The seats were vinyl. There was a tape deck. Life was good.
Unfortunately, it was also stick shift which meant many white-knuckled, engine-killing, gear-grinding drives for myself and my father. And while the man is an AMAZING high school teacher, he totally freaked when teaching me to drive stick. I'm pretty sure its what turned his hair gray. My mom, the infinitely patient kindergarten teacher eventually took over and I learned to love standard. So much control! I felt like a total badass.
I went all over our little town in the blue Subaru. School, various after school jobs, my best friend Rob's house. Weekends, Rob and I would take off to the next town over- Janis Joplin cranked up over the noise of the engine and the roar of the wind from the open windows, chain-smoking Camel lights and singing at the top of our lungs.
I hit a cat once, in that car. It was late at night, complete with pitch-black darkness on the Wyoming highway. Rob and I were returning from a concert in Riverton and zooming along towards home when we heard and felt the KACHUNK KACHUNK. Rob got out to see what I'd hit- I was too chicken. A cat, he reported. We thought about knocking on the door of the nearest ranch house, to see if it was theirs but it was the middle of the night and knocking on random doors in the middle of nowhere at 1:00am didn't seem like the brightest idea. So Rob moved the cat to the side of the road and we continued on in silence, our cigarettes glowing orange in the darkness.
Funny thing, I don't really remember what happened to that car. I think it just got worn out after a while. It fought the good fight but at some point it required repairs that would be more then they were worth. I replaced it with a 1970 something BMW, banana yellow, which I promptly wrecked. After that it was a silver 1980 something Subaru station wagon, named Lucy. (At this point, I started naming my automobiles.) After Lucy came Bonanza Jellybean, the purple Ford Escort. And then my current newish ride- the Silver 2002 Subaru Forrester of recent aquisition. I have named him Stevesie (if you're a Wes Anderson fan, you get it) but Otto prefers Beep Beep Car.
I guess I'm a Subaru girl at heart and the little blue one started it all. Thanks, Cecily, for the ride down memory lane.
