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I have reached an age where I can remember the exact location of the headlight switch in an automobile I haven’t owned in fifty years, but occasionally find myself standing in the kitchen wondering what I came in there to get. I can remember the sound of a particular engine turning over on a cold morning, the smell of an old vinyl interior after a car has spent six hours in the Texas sunshine, and the peculiar resistance of a clutch pedal that required considerably more persuasion than the engineers who designed it probably intended. Yet I cannot always remember whether I took my vitamins this morning, and I have occasionally found myself searching for a pair of glasses that were already sitting on my face.

I used to think this was simply another of the indignities associated with growing older, along with the discovery that getting down on the garage floor is considerably easier than getting back up. But recently I came across an explanation for why our earliest automobiles occupy such an extraordinary amount of space in our memories, and it occurred to me that the subject deserved some serious consideration. Naturally, I decided to undertake this investigation at the Grounds for Divorce, where serious consideration is generally available for the price of a cup of coffee, although the conclusions are rarely guaranteed.

It was a Tuesday morning, and the usual collection of Fort Stockton’s most accomplished authorities on subjects they had never formally studied had assembled around the large table near the window. Angus Hopper was discussing the deteriorating quality of replacement automobile parts, Hairless B29 was explaining why modern engines were unnecessarily complicated, and Chad was complaining that the Piggly Wiggly had received a shipment of canned peaches labeled as pears. Rex Hall, wearing his familiar white pharmacist’s coat, was attempting to read the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch while simultaneously correcting several statements being made by the other three men. Across the street, the morning sun illuminated the sign on Rusty Hammer Hardware, where Rusty himself was undoubtedly engaged in some activity involving a customer who had brought in a broken object and expected him to identify the manufacturer, determine its age, and provide a replacement for less than three dollars.

Lucinda came around with the coffee pot, and I asked the question that would eventually occupy most of our morning.

“What was your first car?”

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Angus answered before anybody else had time to consider the matter. “1949 Ford Tudor. Black. Flathead V8, three-speed manual transmission, and a heater that worked pretty well until you actually needed it. Paid sixty dollars for it, drove it for almost three years, and sold it for seventy-five.”

Hairless immediately congratulated him on making a profit, but Angus explained that the fifteen dollars had hardly compensated him for the experience of watching the Ford disappear down the road with another guy behind the wheel. He had needed the money at the time, and seventy-five dollars represented a considerable sum to a young man who was earning considerably less than he was spending. Nevertheless, he had spent the better part of six decades wondering what had become of the automobile, and admitted that he still occasionally looked through classified advertisements in the unlikely hope of discovering another one exactly like it.

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I found it interesting that Angus could remember every detail of a transaction that had taken place before several of the people at the table had been born, while he had spent ten minutes the previous week trying to remember the name of a restaurant where he had eaten lunch on Thursday. Rex explained that psychologists have identified a phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump, which describes our tendency to retain unusually vivid memories from adolescence and early adulthood. These are the years when we are experiencing many of life’s important events for the first time, and the memories become woven into our developing understanding of who we are.

Hairless considered this explanation before announcing that his own first automobile had been a 1955 Chevrolet two-door sedan that he purchased for forty dollars from a man who was leaving Fort Stockton under circumstances Hairless had never considered it necessary to investigate. The Chevrolet required a battery, two tires, and considerable attention to its ignition system before it could be persuaded to start reliably, but Hairless remembered it with the kind of affection ordinarily reserved for a faithful hunting dog or a woman who had demonstrated extraordinary patience.

“What happened to it?” I asked.

“Sold it to a guy over in Pecos.”

“How much did you get?”

“Thirty dollars.”

“So you lost ten dollars.”

Hairless looked offended. “I got three years of transportation out of it.”

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Rex pointed out that the Chevrolet had also required several hundred dollars’ worth of repairs, a fact Hairless dismissed on the grounds that most of the work had been performed by himself and an uncle who owned a service station. The uncle, according to Hairless, had been particularly generous with his time, although that generosity apparently extended to providing replacement parts, tools, and most of the mechanical knowledge required to complete the repairs. Hairless nevertheless considered the Chevrolet an automobile he had restored entirely through his own efforts, and nobody at the table seemed inclined to challenge his accounting.

The circumstances under which we acquired our first automobiles often reveal considerably more about our families than we understood at the time. Some of us received hand-me-down sedans when our parents purchased newer cars, while others spent summers mowing lawns, pumping gasoline, or working at whatever employment was available to accumulate enough money to purchase something that would move under its own power. A few fortunate teenagers received nearly new automobiles, although I suspect most of them eventually discovered that parental generosity came with certain expectations concerning grades, curfews, and the continued integrity of the vehicle’s sheet metal.

Chad explained that his father had given him the family’s 1966 Chevrolet Bel Air when he purchased a new Buick, an arrangement Chad had always regarded as evidence of his father’s confidence in his maturity. The Chevrolet was a four-door sedan with a six-cylinder engine, an automatic transmission, and a passenger-side floorboard that became damp whenever it rained. Chad had been delighted with it, particularly because several of his classmates were still dependent upon their parents for transportation, and he immediately began washing and waxing the car every Saturday morning.

“My father told me that if I wanted to drive it, I was responsible for maintaining it,” Chad recalled. “I took that very seriously.”

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Lucinda, who had been listening while refilling the sugar dispensers, asked whether the responsibility included repairing the leaking floorboard. Chad admitted that it had not, although he purchased rubber floor mats that made the problem considerably less noticeable. She observed that this was probably the first occasion on which Chad discovered that an inexpensive cosmetic improvement could be substituted for an expensive mechanical repair, a principle that appeared to have served him well throughout his subsequent career in grocery-store management.

But beneath the laughter was something more important. Chad had spent most of his life remembering that Chevrolet as a gift from his father, and it was only after his father died that he began to understand the circumstances surrounding its acquisition. His father could have traded the Chevrolet toward the price of the Buick, but instead chose to give it to his son, knowing that the boy would soon be leaving home and would need transportation.

Chad looked down at his coffee before telling us that his father had never owned another Buick.

Nobody made a joke about that, which may have been the most remarkable development of the morning.

I began thinking about the first time I drove alone, an experience that remains astonishingly clear despite the passage of decades. Until that afternoon, every journey behind the wheel had included somebody sitting beside me, offering instructions, corrections, or unsolicited observations about my apparent inability to distinguish between the brake and accelerator pedals. Then, suddenly, there was nobody in the passenger seat, and the entire responsibility for operating the automobile belonged to me.

I remember pulling away from the curb with a sensation that was equal parts exhilaration and apprehension. The road ahead was familiar, the traffic was ordinary, and nothing about the automobile had changed since the previous afternoon. Yet the experience was entirely different because I was no longer operating the car under somebody else’s supervision. I could turn left or right, choose my destination, and determine how long I wanted to remain away from home, subject only to the limitations imposed by the gasoline in the tank and the understanding that my parents expected to see both me and the automobile again before bedtime.

Angus remembered taking his Ford out beyond the Fort Stockton city limits on his first solo drive, traveling several miles along the highway before turning around and returning home. He had no particular destination in mind and no reason to make the trip other than the extraordinary discovery that he could. Hairless recalled driving his Chevrolet through town several times, hoping somebody from school would notice him behind the wheel, while Chad admitted that he spent his first afternoon of independence visiting three friends who had already seen the Chevrolet sitting in his driveway.

It occurred to me that our first solo drives represented something considerably more important than the acquisition of a driver’s license. For the first time, we were making decisions that carried immediate consequences without somebody sitting beside us to intervene. We could choose where to go, but we also had to choose when to stop, how fast to travel, and whether the questionable noise coming from beneath the hood warranted further investigation. Independence arrived accompanied by responsibility, although most of us were considerably more interested in the former than the latter.

By this point, Trixie had arrived from the Klip-N-Dye, wearing a green blouse and enough jewelry to announce her entrance before she reached the table. She listened to our discussion for several minutes before suggesting that we were overlooking one of the principal reasons teenage boys had been so eager to acquire automobiles.

“Girls,” she said, settling into an empty chair.

Pastor Peterson, sitting at the counter reading the newspaper, looked up with the expression of a man who suspected that the conversation was about to move into territory not entirely suitable for a public eating establishment.

Trixie explained that automobiles provided young people with something they had previously possessed in very limited quantities: privacy. A boy who had spent sixteen years sharing a house with his parents and siblings suddenly possessed a place where he could sit beside a girl without his mother asking whether they wanted something to eat or his younger brother appearing in the doorway to inquire whether he could borrow a baseball glove.

Lucinda observed that the automobile also provided the girl with an opportunity to discover whether the boy possessed any conversational abilities beyond discussing football, automobiles, and the relative merits of various brands of gasoline. Trixie agreed, adding that several of the boys she dated in high school apparently believed that owning a car relieved them of any obligation to develop a personality.

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I remembered evenings when four teenagers would crowd into a sedan that had been designed to accommodate five passengers only under circumstances involving considerable optimism on the part of the manufacturer. Somebody always complained about the temperature, somebody wanted the radio louder, and somebody else insisted that the windows remain closed because the wind was ruining her hair. The driver was expected to provide transportation, entertainment, and enough gasoline to return everybody home, generally on a budget that would not have covered the cost of a decent restaurant meal.

Yet those evenings remain among the most pleasant memories of my youth. We drove around town, stopped for hamburgers, argued about music, and discussed our futures with the confidence of people who had never been required to pay a mortgage or explain an unexpected automobile repair to a spouse. The car itself was frequently uncomfortable, unreliable, and entirely inadequate for the number of passengers it carried, but none of those shortcomings mattered very much because the important part of the experience was the company.

I have owned automobiles since then that were quieter, faster, safer, and equipped with conveniences that would have seemed miraculous when I was seventeen. None of them, however, ever made a Saturday evening feel quite as promising as a worn-out sedan containing four teenagers who had no particular destination and every reason to believe that the future would be wonderful.

Rex introduced another consideration when he mentioned the remarkable ability of certain smells to awaken memories that have been dormant for decades. He explained that the brain processes odors through pathways closely associated with emotion and memory, which helps explain why a particular scent can produce an unexpectedly powerful recollection of an event or person from long ago.

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I knew exactly what he meant. There is a particular combination of warm vinyl, old upholstery, gasoline, dust, and sun-baked dashboard materials that can transport me back to my teenage years more effectively than any photograph. I have opened the door of an old automobile at a car show and found myself remembering a particular afternoon, a familiar street, or a conversation that I hadn’t thought about in half a century. Sometimes the recollection is so immediate that I find myself standing beside the car for several moments, trying to understand why an ordinary smell has suddenly made me feel seventeen again.

Hairless contributed that his Chevrolet possessed an odor he believed originated from something that had died beneath the rear seat, although he had never been able to locate the source. Rex suggested that the smell might have resulted from deteriorating upholstery materials, while Angus wondered whether the previous owner had been transporting livestock. Hairless rejected both explanations, insisting that he recognized the unmistakable smell of decomposition and eventually solved the problem by leaving the windows open whenever possible.

Lucinda asked whether that affected his success with girls, and Hairless admitted that it probably had, although he preferred to believe the Chevrolet’s general appearance had been the more significant obstacle.

I found myself wondering how many memories are preserved in the smells of old automobiles. Cigarette smoke from a father who quit smoking thirty years ago, perfume worn by a girl whose name we haven’t spoken in decades, or the familiar scent of the upholstery in a car that carried an entire family across Texas during summer vacations. Photographs preserve appearances, but smells seem capable of restoring entire moments, complete with emotions we had forgotten we once possessed.

The conversation turned naturally toward the mechanical education provided by our first automobiles, particularly those old enough to require regular attention. Hairless described learning to replace a water pump on his Chevrolet, while Angus recalled adjusting the points on his Ford in the parking lot of a service station outside Monahans. Chad admitted that his mechanical abilities had never progressed much beyond changing oil and replacing spark plugs, although he insisted this had been sufficient to keep the Bel Air operating reliably for several years.

Rusty Hammer arrived while we were discussing the satisfaction of repairing something ourselves, carrying a cardboard box containing an assortment of bolts that a customer had returned to the hardware store after discovering that none of them would fit whatever he had been attempting to assemble. Rusty listened before observing that the first automobile a young man owned was frequently the first complicated machine he had ever been expected to maintain without assistance.

He was right. Many of us learned to use tools because our automobiles required repairs we could not afford to have performed professionally. We learned the difference between a socket wrench and a box-end wrench, discovered that a bolt could be tightened beyond the point of usefulness, and became familiar with the unpleasant sensation of striking our knuckles against a sharp piece of metal after a stubborn fastener finally surrendered. We learned that replacement parts did not always fit as advertised, that repair manuals occasionally omitted important details, and that a simple afternoon project could consume an entire weekend.

Some of those lessons remained useful long after the automobiles themselves had disappeared. I can still recognize the feel of a properly adjusted clutch, remember the movement required to operate a column-mounted gearshift, and reach instinctively for controls located in places where modern manufacturers no longer put them. There are mechanical skills that seem to survive almost indefinitely once they have been learned, even when the details of the original experience have faded.

Rusty suggested that this explained why so many older men continued to enjoy working on their own automobiles despite possessing enough money to have somebody else perform the repairs. The work was not always economical, and it was rarely convenient, but there was satisfaction in discovering that knowledge acquired decades earlier could still be put to use.

Earl, who had been listening with unusual patience, observed that the satisfaction was even greater when the repair succeeded on the first attempt. Hairless replied that he had heard of such occasions but had never personally witnessed one.

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That brought us to the matter of breakdowns, a subject on which everybody possessed considerable expertise. Angus remembered a failed fuel pump that stranded him outside Monahans, while Chad recalled a broken fan belt that interrupted an evening with a girl he had been attempting to impress. Earl described an electrical failure that required him to spend several hours beneath the dashboard of his first Plymouth, and Hairless began recounting another incident involving his Chevrolet before Lucinda suggested that we might want to finish lunch before discussing anything else that happened inside that particular automobile.

I remembered my own early experiences with mechanical failure, particularly the peculiar loneliness of standing beside a disabled car on a West Texas highway. There is something humbling about discovering that the machine which represented your independence has become an immovable object requiring assistance from somebody older, wiser, or equipped with a tow truck. The highway stretches toward the horizon, the afternoon sun continues doing what it does best, and the nearest service station suddenly seems considerably farther away than it appeared on the map.

Those experiences taught habits that have remained with me throughout my life. I learned to check the oil before a long trip, pay attention to the temperature gauge, carry a usable spare tire, and listen carefully when an engine began making a noise that hadn’t been present the previous day. I learned that a jack was useful only if I knew where to position it, and that the lug wrench supplied by the manufacturer had apparently been designed for somebody with considerably more strength and patience than I possessed.

Most importantly, I learned that confidence was not the same thing as competence. A young man can believe himself capable of handling almost anything until he finds himself standing beside a disabled automobile with no idea what has gone wrong. Mechanical failure has a way of correcting exaggerated opinions of one’s abilities, and it generally does so without regard for whether the lesson is convenient.

As the afternoon progressed, I asked the regulars whether they would purchase their first automobiles again if suitable examples became available. Every man at the table answered in the affirmative, although Chad wanted to know whether we were discussing original purchase prices or current market values. Rex pointed out that a properly restored example of almost any automobile we had owned as teenagers would probably cost considerably more than the vehicle had been worth when new, but this information failed to discourage anybody.

I understood their enthusiasm better than most, because I had already done exactly what they were discussing.

The story of how, with the help of a friend in Arizona, I managed to find and purchase a nearly identical replacement for my first automobile, a white-and-blue 1960 Ford Fairlane 500 Town Sedan, has already been well documented on this blog. Suffice it to say that I wanted the car I remembered, not some modernized interpretation of it, and that’s precisely what I found.

Now, I recognize that this was not an entirely rational decision. Modern automobiles are safer, more economical, more comfortable, and considerably better suited to the daily demands of contemporary transportation. My Fairlane possesses none of the conveniences that most drivers now regard as essential, and it occasionally requires the sort of mechanical attention that would send the average owner of a late-model automobile directly to the dealership.

But that was precisely the point. I wasn’t looking for a better automobile than the one I remembered. I was looking for the automobile I remembered.

I have spent considerable time working on it since bringing it home, cleaning and restoring areas that most people will never see, attending to mechanical details, and occasionally discovering that a supposedly simple repair can consume an entire afternoon. I’ve organized the trunk, worked beneath the car, and spent more hours examining its engine compartment than any reasonable person would consider necessary. The white underside of the hood, the red valve cover, the side-mounted air cleaner, and the familiar arrangement of components beneath the hood have become part of a mechanical landscape I know almost as well as my own backyard.

And I still wash it by hand.

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That may be the most revealing part of the entire experience. When I was a teenager, washing my first automobile was an expression of pride in something that belonged to me. Today, the ritual serves much the same purpose, although it also provides an opportunity to spend a quiet afternoon with a machine that connects two very different periods of my life.

I know perfectly well that I cannot purchase my youth a second time. The world has changed, the people who populated those early years have grown older or disappeared, and the teenager who once sat behind that steering wheel has acquired several decades’ worth of experiences that would probably astonish him.

Nevertheless, when I settle into the Fairlane’s driver’s seat, place my hand on the column-mounted gearshift, and turn the key, something familiar happens. The movements require no conscious thought, the controls fall naturally beneath my hands, and the engine settles into an idle that reminds me of a time when owning an automobile was one of the most important achievements of my young life.

The car does not make me seventeen again, but it allows me to remember seventeen with a clarity that few other possessions can provide.

And I have discovered that this is quite enough.

By late afternoon, most of the regulars had returned to their respective responsibilities. Chad went back to the Piggly Wiggly, where the mislabeled canned fruit remained unresolved. Rex returned to the pharmacy, Rusty carried his box of bolts across the street, and Trixie departed for an appointment involving a woman whose hair had apparently suffered an unfortunate encounter with a home coloring kit.

Angus and Hairless remained at the table while Lucinda began preparing the diner for the evening crowd. I sat looking through the window toward Rusty Hammer Hardware, thinking about the extraordinary amount of personal history that can become attached to an ordinary automobile.

The more I considered it, the more I realized that our first cars were important not because they were particularly remarkable machines, but because they arrived during a period when we were experiencing so many important things for the first time. They carried us to our first jobs, our first dates, and our first encounters with responsibilities that could no longer be transferred to our parents. They provided privacy when we needed it, independence when we wanted it, and occasional mechanical disasters when we were least prepared to handle them.

They also introduced us to versions of ourselves that we had not previously known. The boy who learned to repair a broken water pump discovered that he could solve problems without waiting for somebody else to intervene. The teenager who purchased a car with money earned during two summers of work discovered that persistence could produce something tangible. The young man who received his father’s old sedan learned that trust could be expressed through something as ordinary as a set of keys.

And the guy who stood beside the highway waiting for assistance learned that independence did not mean he would never need anybody else.

I thought about the teenager I had been when I first owned an automobile. He was younger, thinner, and considerably more certain about almost everything than the man sitting at the counter. He had no idea how many mistakes he would make, how many opportunities he would overlook, or how many unexpected turns his life would eventually take. He knew very little about marriage, parenthood, mortgages, careers, or the peculiar satisfaction of discovering that an automobile you have owned for several years still starts on the first attempt.

But he knew what freedom felt like, because he had experienced it behind the steering wheel of an old car that belonged to him.

Lucinda came around with the coffee pot and asked whether I had reached any conclusions.

“I think our first cars mattered more than we realized at the time,” I told her. “They weren’t just transportation. They were part of growing up.”

She considered this while topping off my cup, then glanced toward Angus and Hairless, who were discussing whether an old Chevrolet sitting outside town might be worth inspecting.

“Well, if that’s true,” she said, “those two must have missed a few lessons.”

I watched Hairless explain something about the Chevrolet’s engine while Angus listened with the patient expression of a man who had already decided he was going to look at it regardless of what anybody said.

“I wouldn’t be too sure,” I replied. “They seem to have learned how to enjoy themselves.”

Lucinda smiled and went back behind the counter.

I stayed where I was for a while longer, thinking about the Fairlane sitting in my garage. It had taken me a lifetime to return to the automobile that started everything, and I had discovered something rather interesting along the way. The boy who owned the original had wanted nothing more than to get out on the road and see what the world had to offer. The old man who bought its replacement had already seen a considerable portion of that world and wanted, more than anything, to remember how the journey began.

The two of us had considerably different expectations, but we agreed on the automobile.

And I suspect that if the seventeen-year-old version of me could somehow walk into my garage today and discover that I had purchased another white-and-blue 1960 Ford Fairlane 500, he would be delighted right up until the moment I explained what I had paid for it.

He would probably look at the car, look at me, and ask why I hadn’t bought something newer.

I’d tell him that newer wasn’t the point, and that one day, after he’d owned enough automobiles to understand the difference between transportation and something considerably more personal, he might begin to appreciate why I had gone looking for this particular Ford.

Of course, he’d probably think I was an idiot.

At seventeen, I generally did.

But I think he’d change his mind once I handed him the keys.

After all, there are some things that don’t require fifty years of explanation, and the pleasure of driving your first automobile is one of them.

I might even let him take it around the block.

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