Remember Your First?
by Margaret Maron
They say you never forget your first time. . . I mean the first time behind the wheel of the first car you yourself owned the title to. What did you think I meant?
Oh, okay. That, too, but Sarah's post yesterday has me remembering past cars. I learned to drive on my mother's old beat-up Studebaker with a stick shift.
It was impossible to look cool in one of those bullet-nosed oddities, so it didn't bother me when that young naval officer who'd asked me out showed up at my apartment driving a 1948 Plymouth that he'd paid $100 for. 
Rusty and battered, it had been a D.C. taxi in its youth and my hair kept getting caught in the wires that dangled down from the rooftop where the lighted sign had once ridden. I was amused, not embarrassed to be seen in it, and I even came to have a genuine affection for it when, shortly before we were married, he confessed that a general's daughter had turned him down after two dates because she didn't want to be seen driving up to the O Club in that car.
The first car that had my name on the title was the first car my husband and I owned together: a 1960 VW Beetle that we bought on his tour of duty in Italy. Stick-shift, of course. It held a pup tent, sleeping bags, and a Sterno stove; and we camped all over Europe in it. Because we didn't have much money though, we got the stripped-down version. No extras. Among the features considered "extras" were a radio and a fuel gauge. If the car started to sputter, there was a lever under the glove compartment that you could turn to get an extra liter of gas. Believe it or not, in the 10 years we owned that bug, we never once ran out of gas.
After that, the cars blur. I vaguely recall a Hornet, a couple of Fords and a Mercury and I still mourn the old used Lincoln I drove till it got totaled last November. It was so comfortable on long trips and wasn't all that bad on gas either, all things considered. I'd planned to keep it till it died a natural death.
These days I'm driving a plain vanilla Toyota and my husband clings to his 1986 Ford F150 pickup. The snow covers a load of rust and dents, but he's still the same guy that picked me up in that 1948 Plymouth. "It's my mule," he tells me. "What do I care what it looks like?"
Unlike the other men in my family, he's never waxed lyrical over cars. I guess when you grow up in NYC and don't learn to drive till you're 25, it's not the same as growing up out in the country and hungering for the freedom of your first set of wheels. My brother can tell you every car he's ever owned: how much it cost him, how he worked out the money, why he traded it. Same for most of my male friends. My women friends? They might remember the guy with the cool Jag or the car they learned how to drive in or the one they got on their 16th birthday, but after that?
What about you? Is there one particular car that lives on in your heart?
