Driving (with) Miss Dee

[image error]Last week at some point I was discussing a friend's daughter who was turning sixteen.  The inevitable conversation about driving occurred and I was thrown back to my first days as a driver.  (It didn't make me think of my own child because in NYC nobody drives.)  

Anyway, although I could write an entire post about my attempts (note the plural) to gain a driver's license and the various fender benders that resulted from said license, I'm choosing instead to remember my first car.  I think everyone in America has a love affair with their first car.  No matter if it's old or new, in mint condition or held together with safety pins.  And I was no exception.  Except that I wasn't even supposed to have a car.  

In 1976, when I was a junior in high school, I was given the choice between taking a pretty spectacular trip or getting a car.  Being a live to explore kind of girl, it was a no brainer for me, I went on the trip and never looked back.  

But I had the most amazing grandfather and when I got home—I got a car after all.  A 1967 Impala Super-Sport.   It was the coolest car ever.   A good friend of my grandmother's had bought it (in 1967) and apparently, being unable to say 'no' to the car dealer, she bought it fully loaded.   To start with, it had a 385 horsepower, 427 cubic inch V-8 engine.  (I have no idea what that means actually except that it had game).   It was butternut yellow with a black vinyl top and a black leather interior.   The gas cap was hidden behind the license plate (a gas station attendant had to show me, or I'd probably still be walking around it trying to fill it up).  It had the shift on the floor and a manifold vacuum.  (Still, no idea what that really is).  And it was the size of a tank.  I kid you not.  Had we been confronted with a battle, I'd have put my money on my car. [image error]

In short, it was a cool car, even though it was ten years old when I got it.  My grandmother's friend hardly ever drove it so it only had like 20,000 miles on it.  And it was in mint condition.  Of course I immediately decided it needed a name.   So she became Big Mary Virginia.  (A combination of my grandfather, my grandmother, and her friend's names.)  She took me and my friends everywhere.   The endless circle to the lake and MacDonald's and back again, to out-of-town football games, to concerts, great parties (she once wound up sideways in a ditch thanks to my inability to drive in reverse) and too many road trips to count.  She joined me at college after I made my grades my freshman year.  

And she aged…sometimes gracefully.  Sometimes not.  Her engine once caught fire in a part of Little Rock I shouldn't have been in at midnight.  She had to be towed after the above parking disaster.   She spent the night at an impound lot once after I suffered a parking meter incident.  She broke her water pump and had to be "watered" every fifteen minutes until I got her home from college and to my dad's mechanic.  

And then she died, in 1981, on the side of a road just outside Texarkana, as I drove home from college for the very last time.   (The heat light had burned out –so I didn't know I was in trouble until smoke poured from the gear shift and the block was cracked and the piston was welded—or visa-versa—never can remember that, either).  Anyway, after a trucker came to my rescue (no cell phones in those days) my dad had to drive from Dallas to pick me up, and Big Mary Virginia was left behind (and later sold for parts, I think).   

But she holds a huge place in all my memories from those days.  And she was loved.   Really, really loved. 

So what about your first car?   Good memories? 

*note, the pictures here are not of my actual car.  I have lots of course, but like most of my other older photos—they're in storage in Queens.     And BMV actually is set to appear in next year's Deep Disclosure–or at least her fictionalized version.