Jeff's Spleen

My first car.

For some reason (senility? botulism?) I have been thinking today about all the cars I have owned in this sweet, magical lifetime of mine. Now, I guess I should say, I'm not a car guy. I hate driving, and never think even for a second about getting a car that might "look nice," because, to me, it'd be like getting a good-looking toilet, like this solid-gold beauty:

A car, to me, is just a utilitarian thing that I must deal with at times for practical purposes, such as the disposal of dead bodies, but to which I attach no feelings of pride or status or ego. Which is clear when you actually see what I have driven over the years.

To wit, my very first car, presented to me by my father upon my 16th birthday in 1977, was a used 1968 Ford Galaxie. Check this beauty out (not my exact car--mine was blue--but the best that Google could yield):

I busted this car up on the very first day I owned it. Twice. First, I backed up into a telephone pole. Since the pole was on the sidewalk, this means that first I actually had to jump the curb, then hit the pole. Then, later, while leaving an underground parking garage, I midjudged the distance between my car and the giant cement pillar I was parked next to, and scraped the car all the way around, caving in both the passenger front and rear doors. (Being 16, the scraping sound didn't clue me in that maybe I should stop after caving in the first door.)

Soon after that, one of my friends drew a face on the passenger window with an orange permanent marker, and wrote the word "Myron" underneath. From that day forward, until the car bit the dust two years later, that 1968 Ford Galaxie became known as the Myronmobile.

Posted by jeff at June 7, 2004 4:01 PM