'57 Chevy

Everybody in Berkeley is so PC that they all drive Priuses (Prii?), so it does my heart good to run across a car like this in a downtown parking garage in Santa Rosa--perfectly maintained, spotlessly clean and shiny, a fabulous color and screaming pride of ownership.

When I met Oilman, he drove a '57 Chevy, which I think he shared with one of his
Cal Tech classmates. Apparently I not only won OilMan's heart, but we got to keep the car when we got married. After it broke down one night on the Richmond Bridge, we traded it in on a "Midnight Blue" 65 Mustang convertible. It was rarely warm enough to put the top down, which eventually disintegrated for lack of use, but we loved that car, and kept it until our third child was three years old, even though it was inconvenient and probably wildly unsafe. (We basted ourselves in baby oil and fried ourselves on the beach back then too.)

They just don't make cars like they used to. These days, they are boring, reliable and think they are smarter than you. My car locks me in (whether I want to be locked in or not) after it has gone a few feet. It has sensors on all four sides which beep a different beep for each side whenever anything gets close to it. This is rarely useful, and downright maddening when I'm trying to parallel park, or back out of the garage. I could probably tolerate the one that beeps when I am about to back over my neighbor's dog or my grandson's new bike, but if you need a beeper to tell you that someone is crossing the street in front of your car, you shouldn't be behind the wheel!

When did we stop thinking for ourselves When did we stop having fun?