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After completing the recent rejuvenation of the trunk of the Fairlane 500, I did something I hadn’t done in far too long. I backed the old Ford out of the garage, parked it squarely in the middle of the driveway, uncoiled the garden hose, and washed it by hand from top to bottom. The original idea was purely practical. The Fairlane had collected masking-tape residue, a fine dusting of oversprayed trunk paint, and enough road grime from its last outing to suggest that portions of Pecos County had decided to come home with me. All I intended to do was wash away the evidence, dry the car, put it back in the garage, and move on to whatever other essential retirement activity was waiting for me, which probably involved sitting down somewhere and thinking about what I might do next.

But somewhere between rinsing the roof and working a soapy wash mitt across that broad 1960 hood, the job became something more. It became reflective. Almost ceremonial. The steady rhythm of washing one section at a time slowed everything down enough for memories to catch up with me. There I was in my own driveway, taking care of my own automobile while anybody walking past RoadRunner Estates could gaze upon the scene and appreciate a man communing with his machine. Nobody actually walked past, of course. People don’t walk anywhere in Fort Stockton during summer unless their car has broken down beyond the effective range of prayer. Still, the opportunity was there.

A modern car wash can clean a car in four minutes. Washing one by hand can occupy an entire morning if you know what you’re doing and are in no particular hurry. That is not inefficiency. That is fellowship.

The ritual came back to me almost whole, beginning with my father teaching me the right way to wash the family car. There was a correct way, and therefore there were countless incorrect ways available to any boy careless enough to invent one. Dad approached washing a car much the way a surgeon approached an operation, except surgeons generally did not perform their work barefoot in Bermuda shorts with a Marlboro hanging from one corner of their mouths.

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First came the bucket. Not just any bucket, either, but the designated plastic car-washing bucket, which had once served some other household purpose before being promoted to the automotive division. Into it went just enough Palmolive Gold, a product whose name suggested it ought to be golden but which was, ironically, green. That contradiction never seemed to trouble anyone. Back then America still possessed the emotional resilience to accept green soap named Gold without forming a congressional committee to investigate it.

The bucket was filled in the kitchen sink with warm water—not cold, and certainly not too hot. Too much soap wasted money and left residue. Too little soap demonstrated a moral weakness. Dad knew the proper amount without measuring. He squeezed the bottle for precisely as long as necessary and then shut it off with the instinctive timing of a man who could also tell when steaks needed turning without poking them seventeen times.

The entire car had to be parked in the shade before the washing began. This was not a suggestion.

“You don’t want that soap to burn right onto the finish,” Dad warned.

I didn’t know soap could burn automobile paint, but the seriousness in his voice made it clear that we were dealing with forces only slightly less dangerous than gasoline and communism. The car was positioned beneath whatever shade the property offered, even if that meant waiting for the Earth to rotate into a more favorable alignment. You did not argue with the sun. You planned around it.

The first rinse loosened the dirt and cooled the sheet metal. The hose nozzle was adjusted to produce a firm spray without reaching pressure-washer strength, since pressure washers had not yet been invented for residential use and, had they been, Dad would have regarded them as a shortcut favored by men who also wore clip-on neckties. Once the car was thoroughly wet, we began at the top and worked our way down. Roof first. Then the windows, hood, trunk, fenders, doors, and quarter panels. Gravity had rules, and so did Dad.

The tires always came last because they were the dirtiest part of the car and because plunging a tire-blackened sponge back into the bucket before washing the hood was the sort of mistake a boy made only once. The whitewalls and chrome received special attention from SOS pads, those marvelous bundles of steel wool infused with miracle cleansers and, as far as Dad was concerned, certain medicinal properties. SOS pads could remove brake dust, road film, tarnish, oxidation, small sins, stubborn attitudes, and possibly an unwanted tattoo if you bore down hard enough.

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Every strip of chrome was polished until it caught the sunlight and threw it into the neighbor’s yard. Bumpers, grille, hubcaps, door handles, window trim—nothing escaped. Cars of that period carried enough chrome to interfere with low-flying aircraft, and maintaining it was not a casual undertaking. A man might spend half an hour on one bumper and another ten minutes standing back with his hands on his hips, judging whether the bumper was sufficiently impressed with him.

Paste wax came next, and paste wax could make a man search his soul. You applied it with a round pad in overlapping circular motions, one small section at a time, waiting for the wax to haze before buffing it away. The circles were hypnotic in subtle ways God intended. After enough time rubbing carnauba wax into a hood, a man might reconsider his career, remember an apology he owed somebody, or finally admit that the noise beneath the dashboard was not going to fix itself. Waxing rewarded patience, punished haste, and left your shoulders sore enough to assure you that something worthwhile had been accomplished.

Windex and a roll of paper towels took care of the windows, inside and out. The inside mattered because interior glass acquired a mysterious film that seemed to originate from cigarettes, vinyl upholstery, human breath, and whatever chemicals Detroit had embedded in the dashboard. Cleaning the windshield required twisting yourself across the front seat at an angle generally associated with industrial accidents. The lower corners remained almost unreachable, but Dad reached them because leaving a streak was an admission of defeat.

Then came Mom’s Kirby.

Dragging that vacuum cleaner into the driveway required an extension cord, determination, and several soft curses directed at whoever had eaten French fries in the front seat and allowed so many of them to slip between the seat and console. A French fry dropped into that crevice ceased to be food and became an archaeological artifact. The Kirby would roar, Dad would wedge the attachment into the gap, and eventually something would rattle up the hose with enough force to make us wonder whether we had just vacuumed up a quarter, a bolt from the seat track, or part of the transmission.

The trunk received the same treatment, although vacuuming it generally produced a separate category of accusation.

“Your mother went to the craft store again.”

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That conclusion was reached whenever the Kirby uncovered glitter. Glitter did not vacuum willingly. It clung to trunk mats, cardboard boxes, spare tires, clothing, skin, and the human spirit. Dad believed glitter was the Devil’s work and its sale should be outlawed, although he never said this where Mom could hear him. A man may have strong convictions and still understand the governing structure of his own home.

Throughout the process there were pauses. They were essential. You periodically stopped, stood back, and studied what had been accomplished. Depending upon the hour, the season, and whether a football game was coming on television, the pause might be accompanied by a cold brown bottle of Hamm’s or a filtered Marlboro. The beer was never hurried, and the cigarette was smoked while looking thoughtfully at the car, as though the old man and Detroit were privately reviewing one another’s workmanship.

Every so often, I would breathe deeply and catch the combined scent of wet concrete, warm rubber, Palmolive Gold, Windex, cigarette smoke, and carnauba wax. No fragrance company has ever managed to bottle it. If they did, every man over sixty would take one whiff, stare into the middle distance, and immediately start telling you about the first car he ever owned.

There are many lessons a father passes to a son through direct instruction or simple osmosis. How to mow a straight line. How to hold a flashlight in the wrong place while being told repeatedly where the right place is. How to shake hands, change a tire, check the oil, sharpen a pocketknife, and recognize when a household repair has gone beyond his abilities and entered the realm of professional intervention. But few lessons are as critical to a life well lived as learning how to wash the family car.

That was simply what people did in the 1950s and ’60s. Washing the car belonged to the same category as mowing the lawn, cleaning the house, and buying the groceries. These were family duties carried out on the weekend to keep everything in the condition and order God intended. The car was almost always washed on Saturday because it needed to look its best when the family loaded into it Sunday morning and parked in the lot at the Almost United Methodist Church.

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Cleanliness is next to godliness, particularly in the automotive sense. It is biblical. Somewhere in the Old Testament, probably near the passage advising a man not to covet his neighbor’s Buick.

A clean car communicated something. It said the household was operating properly. The lawn had been cut, the children had been threatened into clean clothes, the offering envelope was filled out, and the family would arrive at church together whether or not they had spoken to one another since breakfast. You could tell a lot about a man by the shine on his automobile. You could tell even more by whether he cleaned the bugs off the grille or simply hoped nobody would look that closely.

When Buttercup and I married forty-seven years ago, we moved into an apartment. Apartment life offered many advantages to young newlyweds, but access to a private driveway and garden hose was not among them. Even so, I would drive the original Fairlane 500 a few miles to my parents’ house and use their driveway, their hose, their water, and their Palmolive Gold. Dad did not object. He understood that a son may leave home, marry, and establish his own household while still retaining certain rights to the family spigot.

It remained a ritual until final exams interfered with it. I was in college, busy studying, short on time, short on money, and long on the belief that one poor test score might condemn me to a career involving a paper hat. The Fairlane needed washing, but I could not spare an entire afternoon to do it properly. So I splurged and took it to an automated car wash.

This was the kind where you left the automobile with an attendant, went inside, and selected the Bronze, Silver, or Gold Service. You paid at a counter and then walked beside a long wall of glass, watching your car receive the treatment you had purchased. The Bronze Service appeared to involve getting the car wet and wishing it well. The Gold included nearly everything short of an engine rebuild and a handwritten note from the company president. Being in college, I could afford only the Silver.

The Silver Service included rotating brushes that cleaned the whitewall tires. I knew this because the sign said so, and I had paid extra for the privilege. What the sign did not mention was that the brushes also removed fender skirts.

I stood behind the glass and watched the Fairlane move down the automated line. Everything seemed fine until the tire brushes reached the rear wheels. One rotating brush caught the first fender skirt, tore it loose, and flung it against the rear quarter panel. The skirt scraped down the side of the Fairlane before falling onto the conveyor. The other brush, apparently inspired by what it had witnessed, grabbed the second skirt and repeated the performance on the opposite side.

For one suspended moment, both fender skirts lay wounded beneath the car. Then the next vehicle entered the tunnel and ran over them.

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I opened my mouth to yell, but the scream came out at a frequency audible only to dogs in the surrounding neighborhood. I waved my arms. I jumped up and down. I pointed through the glass with the desperation of a man witnessing a loved one being pulled beneath farm machinery. Employees on the other side continued their work, protected by the special indifference granted to people who know the customer cannot reach them.

Finally, the manager wandered over. He looked at the car. He looked at the mangled fender skirts. He looked at me.

“We’ll take care of it.”

I tried to explain that he had no idea how hard it was to find fender skirts for a 1960 Ford Fairlane 500. Even then, they were not stocked beside the air fresheners at Western Auto. Ford had not produced warehouses full of replacement skirts in anticipation of one college student selecting the Silver Service years later.

He shrugged.

“We’ll take care of it.”

Tears welled in my eyes. Not theatrical tears. Automotive tears. The sort produced when stamped steel meets industrial machinery and the responsible party responds with the emotional range of a parking meter. I found myself wondering whether the disaster would have occurred if I had paid for the Gold Service. Perhaps Gold customers received brushes trained to recognize optional bodywork. Perhaps they merely got their fender skirts destroyed with a better grade of soap.

The car wash eventually made good on the damage, but that was beside the point. Trust had been broken. I vowed never again to drive a classic car through an automated wash. For several nights I had bad dreams involving spinning brushes, flying sheet metal, and managers emerging from clouds of detergent to assure me they would take care of it. Buttercup listened sympathetically but could not fully relate. There are certain regions of male suffering a wife may visit, but she cannot become a permanent resident.

Automated car washing had begun innocently enough. According to the history published by Rocket Carwash, the first commercial car wash appeared around 1914, most often credited to Frank McCormick and J.W. Hinkle in Detroit. It was essentially an automotive assembly line operated by hand. Workers pushed the cars through, with different people assigned to soap, rinse, and dry them. In 1940, a Hollywood car wash introduced a conveyor that pulled vehicles through the tunnel, although attendants still scrubbed and dried them. An overhead sprinkler followed in 1946. By 1951, the Anderson brothers in Seattle had added automated soap-and-water nozzles, mechanical brushes, and dryers. Dan Hanna opened his first Rub-a-Dub wash in Oregon in 1955, expanded the business, began supplying equipment to other operators, and helped carry mechanized washing across the country. Flex-service operations appeared in the 1980s, and by 2001 automated payment terminals and gates had produced the modern express wash, where human involvement was reduced primarily to pointing at your front tires and shouting, “Neutral!”

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Each advance made the process quicker, easier, and more efficient. With each advance, America lost a small piece of her soul. It was a pattern that would be repeated many times over, eventually reaching its natural conclusion when Mayor Goodman was elected.

Am I equally adamant about hand washing my late-model daily driver? No. Principles are important, but so is being able to reach the roof. Times have changed. Vehicles have grown until an ordinary SUV now possesses the height and curb weight of a modest municipal building. I cannot reach the top of mine, and I have no intention of dragging out a ladder to perform a task that combines soapy water, wet concrete, and the balance I currently possess. At my age, falling off a ladder does not lead to an amusing story. It leads to paperwork and the strong possibility of somebody cutting off my pants.

I take the SUV to Tiny Bubbles Car Wash just down the street from RoadRunner Estates. I pull beneath the covered area ahead of the entrance, where a scanner reads my license plate and knows I have prepaid monthly for the Deluxe Wash. An attendant waves me forward, guides the tires onto the conveyor, and tells me to put the transmission in neutral and keep my foot off the brake. Modern technology takes over. Colored soap splashes across the windshield. Brushes slap the doors. Water jets attack from every direction. If she’s with me, Mila giggles.  I do to.  The dryer roars over the roof. Four minutes later, I am back on the street and headed toward the Grounds for Divorce for a fresh cup of Folgers.

The SUV is clean. I have received the wash, but not the experience.

Hand washing the Fairlane reminded me of the difference.

Working my way around that old Ford, I noticed things an automated car wash never would. A piece of tape residue beside the trunk opening. A trace of paint dust near the rear bumper. A tiny chip along the edge of a door. The curve of the rear quarter panel. The way water collected around the chrome trim before slipping down the blue-and-white paint. Every pass of the wash mitt was an inspection, a recollection, and a quiet acknowledgment of stewardship. The Fairlane was not merely being cleaned. It was being looked after.

Machines can perform labor, but they cannot care. Care requires time, attention, memory, and occasionally getting down on one knee beside a whitewall tire while muttering about a spot that refuses to come clean.

When I finished, I rinsed the Fairlane one final time and watched the soap slide along the driveway toward the gutter. I dried the windows, polished the chrome, and stood back to inspect the result. The wet concrete darkened the driveway beneath the car. Water dripped from the rocker panels. The afternoon light settled gently across the long hood, and for a moment the old Ford looked less like something built sixty-six years ago than something waiting outside my parents’ house for Sunday morning.

Dad was gone. The Palmolive Gold was gone. Mom’s Kirby had long since vacuumed its last French fry. Hamm’s beer no longer came with a cartoon bear promising refreshment from the land of sky-blue waters, and the filtered Marlboro had never become a habit after failing to impress girls when I was 16. But the ritual remained, waiting in a plastic bucket and a coiled garden hose for somebody to remember it.

I remembered.

I stood there breathing in the scent of wet concrete and clean automobile, admiring the Fairlane and feeling that peculiar satisfaction that comes only from completing a job slowly enough to become part of it. For a little while, I was a boy beside his father again, learning that the roof came first, the tires came last, shade mattered, glitter was evil, and anything worth owning was worth caring for with your own two hands.

It almost made me want a cold Falstaff and a Marlboro.

Almost.

Some memories are better revisited than resumed.

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