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My
family moved from an army base in Germany to suburban Detroit
when I was nine. Two teenage boys lived next door. They were always
working on cars and talking about cars. I admired their ability
to identify in an instant the make, model and year of any and
every car that passed by on the street.
I
decided to learn, too. Our house was near a heavily trafficked
main road, so I got plenty of practice. A fresh pack streamed
by every time the light down the road turned green. Buicks back
then were easy. The little portholes in the front fenders were
dead giveaways. Cadillacs had those big fins, and so did '57
Plymouths. The Edsel's nosepiece was easy to spot, as was Oldsmobile's
"Rocket 88" hood ornament. And so on. The main foreign
cars back then were Volkswagen Beetles, which posed no problem
to me, nor, as yet, to Detroit. To this day, I can identify
most American cars manufactured in the '50's quicker than Lee
Iacocca could have said, "Toyota Corolla Tercel".
Eventually,
instead of looking at cars with boys, I began looking at boys
with cars. I was particularly attracted for a time to a white
'55 Thunderbird driven by a blond quarterback. We used to drive
to McDonald's after school, and it was fun while it lasted,
which wasn't for very long, because I wasn't quite as fast as
the T-Bird.
Cruising
up and down Woodward Avenue, which runs from the Detroit River
all the way out past the northern suburbs, was a favorite pastime
of any Detroit-area adolescent who had the price of a tank of
gas. At twenty-odd cents per gallon, we put a lot of miles on
our parents' wheels when we were supposedly over at a friend's
house studying geometry. My next boyfriend and I used to take
his mother's white '64 Valiant and drive around half the night.
We'd spend the other half fogging up the windows, parked in
my parents' driveway, until my dad put a stop to it by turning
on the porch lights.
In
graduate school, I briefly had a boyfriend who briefly had a
silver Corvette Stingray. I cracked it up, putting it into a
drainage ditch along Interstate 10 on the way to Daytona Beach
at Spring break. As I explained to the skeptical state trooper,
a skinny-tailed animal with a pointed face and huge red eyes
leapt out at me. He couldn't find a dead possum for evidence,
but he let me go without a ticket. Unfortunately, the boyfriend
was not so reasonable, and things were all over between us before
we got anywhere near a beach. (CONTINUE...)
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