Baby you can drive my car.

          According to the calendar, this post will appear on February 23^rd, so maybe by then the blizzard we lived through in the Northeast in late January will be a distant memory.  But while it’s still fresh, I’m here to sing the praises of my car, which handily conveyed us throughout the worst of the storm.  It’s a 2023 Subaru Outback, with the turbo 2.4 liter engine, and I’m not being paid to say so.

Indomitable Subaru Outback

            My father was a mechanical engineer, and for him breathing was the only thing more important than his cars (family, country and school ties came after that, though I’m not sure in what order). I’m a creature of suburbia, having lived in city apartments only three and a half years out of a long life.  This means cars have also been a full extension of my being, as necessary to survival as arms and legs.   I don’t remember learning how to drive, because this was just something we did from the moment we could see above the dashboard.  Acquiring a divers license was a simple formality easily accomplished on one's sixteenth birthday.

            The world will be better off when self-driving, electric cars take over, but for some of us, car guys, something will be lost.   

            If you’re looking for relevance to a blog focused on crime writing, I’ll refer you to Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe, who spend a lot of time driving their mid-century jalopies all over California, or a great fresh talent, Shawn Cosby, whose hotrods live at the center of the action.  My main protagonist owns a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix, an impossibly enormous and powerful hunk of Detroit Iron he drives for no other reason than it belonged to his dead father.  One of our legendary mystery writers said that a detective’s work mostly entails driving around in cars and interviewing people.  I can’t remember which one, but the conclusion is inescapable.  A lot of mysteries involve wearing out shoe leather, but the vast majority require a drivers license and the willingness to test local traffic laws.

            In life as in fiction, cars are a means to an end, but the journey can be just as important.  Odysseus had to make do with creaky ships, cowboys and knights errant had their horses, but we’re lucky these days to slip behind the wheel of a stupidly wasteful device that, appropriately powered, thrusts us back into the seat and hurtles us over macadam with heedless intent.    

1965 Chelsea Grey MGB

            A few weeks after graduating from college, a friend and I got in my '65 MG and drove from Pennsylvania to California on a circuitous route that covered about half the lower 48.  We weren’t trying to mimic Jack Kerouac, or Martin Milner and George Maharis, we just felt like doing it.  Since road trips and narratives are inextricable, this was a tidy novel of experience that defies calculation.  I recommend it for all young people, though I’d use something a little more cushy and commodious than an MGB. 

            We know rationally that cars are not living beings, but the ones of my youth were animated when christened with names.  An abbreviated list includes Alice Blue, Dudley, The Silver Goose, The Blue Max, Vinnie, Ford Maddox Ford Ford, El Clunko, Vance and Jeanne la putain. I had one of the first Accords that I named Jane Fonda the Honda, and whenever my toddler son climbed into his car seat he would say, ‘’Hi Janie!’’. 

We maintained those cars mostly ourselves, spending lots of time under the hood and chassis, on creepers with grease on our hands and drips in our eyes.  So maybe intimacy with their inner workings created a bond impossible today, cars being black-box computers on wheels only knowable to high tech diagnostics.  That’s true of my Subaru, though its

Brake job on The Silver Goose

personality still leaks through the circuitry and into my subconscious.  The basics prevail.  It’s an internal combustion vehicle with pedals and a steering wheel, and it goes where I point it and apply thrust.  And most importantly, responds to the little turns and twitches of my fingers and the instantaneous judgements of my eyes and reptilian brain. 

James Taylor said it best:

Now when I die
I don't want no coffin
Thought 'bout it all too often
Just strap me in behind the wheel
And bury me with my automobile