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PART I OF III

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I had a cool uncle.

That phrase gets tossed around pretty loosely, but this wasn’t the kind of cool measured in motorcycles or bar fights or how many beers he could drink without blinking. This was a deeper, more disorienting cool—an existential cool. The kind that makes a kid quietly realize, long before he has the vocabulary for it, that adulthood doesn’t have to arrive wearing a necktie and a scowl.

He was my mother’s oldest brother. Single. Never married. Permanently unattached in a way that felt intentional, not accidental. His name was Geré. The acute accent on the last e was always intriguing to me. I was never quite sure whether my grandmother had a flair for the dramatic when she filled out the birth certificate, or whether it was something he added himself later. But a name with its own punctuation—despite being pronounced exactly like the “Jerry” of Jerry Lewis—proved that you could be like everybody else and like nobody else at the same time. That is no small lesson to absorb early.

He lived in our basement while he was in medical school, which, in retrospect, already made him an outlier. Adults didn’t usually live in basements unless something had gone sideways. But with him, it didn’t feel like hiding. It felt like staging.

The basement was his forward operating base. A bunk. A desk buried under anatomy texts and yellow legal pads. A faint, permanent blend of coffee, rubbing alcohol, and whatever cologne nurses wore in the late 1950s. He slept irregular hours. He studied like a monk. And when he came upstairs—usually late in the evening—he spoke to everyone exactly the same way, without editing himself for age, gender, or company.

That’s how I learned phrases no toddler should know.

Looking down at me one evening, deadpan, he said, “It’s hotter than a four-balled tomcat in here,” and walked on past like he’d just commented on the weather. My mother froze. My father pretended not to hear it. I didn’t understand the words, but I understood the tone. This was an adult who didn’t filter himself for children, which meant—by extension—he didn’t see children as fragile idiots.

That alone would’ve earned him points.

But the cars—that’s where the damage was done.

The first one I barely remember. And what I do remember may not be memory at all, but memory’s second cousin: the family photo album. A heavy thing with black pages and little white corner tabs that peeled if you weren’t careful. There are pictures of a massive black sedan with a red roof parked in the driveway like a visiting dignitary. I remember the shape more than the details. Bulbous. Rounded. As if it had been drawn by someone who didn’t believe in straight lines.

Even as a toddler, I knew it wasn’t like the other cars.

That was the 1953 Nash Ambassador Super Sedan.

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At the time, it might as well have been a spaceship.

The Nash didn’t shout. It didn’t wear fins or chrome daggers or jet-age bravado. Instead, it looked… considered. Thoughtful. Like a car designed by people who believed the future would be cleaner, quieter, and slightly odd. Which, in its way, it was.

It wore black paint with a red roof—not a decorative flourish so much as a declaration. Most cars in the driveway were single-color, respectable things. Beige. Green. Blue. The Nash arrived wearing evening attire. Black below, red above, like it had somewhere better to be than sitting in front of our house.

Designed during Nash’s “Golden Anniversary” period, the Ambassador’s body flowed as one continuous shape. No separate fenders. No interruptions. The wheels lived beneath smooth, enveloping arches, as if the car had grown around them. It was unit-body construction before most Americans trusted the idea, and it gave the Nash a solid, monolithic presence. It didn’t look assembled. It looked cast.

A Flying Lady hood ornament leaned forward like she was leading the charge, and a small Farina emblem sat politely on the fender—an Italian signature hidden in plain sight. Pinin Farina had been involved in the design, and even if you didn’t know the name, you could feel the difference. This wasn’t Detroit brawn. This was something imported—intellectually, if not physically.

The grille stood upright with vertical bars, dignified and almost architectural. No grin. No sneer. Just a firm handshake.

For a kid whose automotive world consisted mostly of anonymous sedans, the Nash wasn’t transportation.

It was an event.

My uncle drove it like a man who understood irony.

He was a medical student, which meant money was tight, time was tighter, and sleep was negotiable. Yet he somehow found the bandwidth to own something as unconventional as a Nash Ambassador when the rest of the world was happily buying Chevrolets and Fords by the acre.

The Ambassador Super wasn’t cheap when new, and it wasn’t common. Just over twelve thousand four-door Supers were built that year, and none of them were meant for people who wanted to blend in. Nash buyers were engineers, professors, architects, and men who read instruction manuals recreationally. Which tracked.

Under the hood lived the 252.6-cubic-inch Jetfire inline-six, a seven-bearing, counter-balanced engine that ran smoother than it had any right to. It wasn’t fast—120 horsepower wasn’t going to scare anyone—but it was refined. It made its power politely, like a doctor clearing his throat before speaking.

The three-speed column shift with overdrive was perfect for a man who spent his days memorizing the human body and his nights driving young nurses to dinner. Third gear engaged, overdrive slipped in quietly, and the Nash settled into a long-legged lope that felt almost European. It didn’t race.

It traveled.

And it traveled well.

Inside, the Nash was a study in gray—vinyl and cloth bench seats, door panels to match, carpeting that looked like it had been selected by someone who disliked distraction. The steel dash was two-tone, the instruments offset like they’d been arranged thoughtfully rather than symmetrically forced. A hundred-mile-per-hour speedometer. Temperature. Fuel. Nothing unnecessary. Everything legible.

The steering wheel was thin and large, with a chrome horn ring that looked ceremonial. When my uncle sat behind it, one hand resting casually at the top, he didn’t look like he was driving. He looked like he was presiding.

The Weather Eye ventilation system—a Nash specialty—fed fresh air into the cabin in a way that felt ahead of its time. The car didn’t get stuffy. It didn’t smell like gasoline and regret. It smelled like possibility and whatever perfume happened to be riding shotgun.

Which, more often than not, belonged to a nurse.

Those nurses were a rotating cast of smiles, laughter, and perfume. They arrived at the house laughing too loudly, leaning into the doorway, calling my uncle by his first name like it tasted good in their mouths. He’d take them out in the Nash, and they’d return later with their hair a little windblown, their lipstick slightly compromised.

No one asked questions.

He didn’t brag. He didn’t explain himself. He just lived that way—unapologetically—while studying harder than anyone else I’ve known before or since.

That contrast—discipline paired with indulgence—left a mark.

The Nash was the perfect accomplice. Flashy without being vulgar. Different without being desperate. It suggested taste without insisting upon it. And to a kid watching from the living-room window, it looked like freedom on whitewall tires.

Even now, decades later, the shape of it still feels familiar. The gentle arch of the roofline. The way the rear tapered without fins, capped by taillights that felt like thoughtful punctuation rather than exclamation points. The spare tire resting patiently in the trunk. The long wheelbase smoothing the world one mile at a time.

This wasn’t a car built to impress neighbors.

It was built to impress yourself.

Other cars came later—each more memorable than the last—but this one was the primer. The first hint that automobiles could be statements, philosophies, even personalities.

My uncle moved on to his next chapter, and I moved on to being a kid who noticed things. But the Ambassador stayed with me. In photographs. In half-memories. In the way I still gravitate toward the oddball option on any lineup. Maybe it was the way all four wheel openings seemed to be skirted that nudged me toward a lifelong fender-skirt fixation.

Or perhaps it was the time I walked into the basement unannounced early one Saturday morning and found my uncle deep into an advanced anatomy lesson with a new blond ER nurse. She seemed far more startled by the intrusion than he did. Perhaps that’s the difference between doctors and nurses.

I suspect that in the late fifties, the car he drove was a small part of the attraction she—and the string of others—felt toward the resident occupying our basement.

Because that Nash wasn’t just a car.

It was proof.

Proof that you could live differently. That you didn’t have to follow the herd. That intelligence and eccentricity weren’t mutually exclusive. That adulthood could be serious without being dull.

And that sometimes, the coolest thing a man can do is show a kid—without ever saying a word—that there’s more than one way to move through the world.

One day, the Ambassador was gone. Exiled to another country for the next diplomatic assignment, I suppose. What took its place in the driveway changed me forever.

Even more than the nurse in the basement had.

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