Fragments From Floyd

Our first new car was "the Poop": a 1974 Datsun Hatchback-- 45 mpg, shaped like an aquatic insect, baby-poop yellow. In October of that year, I left behind my wife and new daughter and my career of rat mutilation; and in our new car I traveled to Blacksburg, Virginia to go canoeing on the New River with a friend of mine. A few months later, we were pulling the Poop behind a U-Haul to Virginia. Our first new car represented our fledgling taste of adult autonomy and financial independence. It was the symbol of new life in a growing family, and a fresh start in new country. Never since has a new car smelled so gloriously new as that first one.

Yesterday, we brought home our sixth new vehicle-- a Subaru Forester. And through my window, there it sits, down by the creek all squarish and looking way too much like a miniature S. U.- know-what to suit me. It will be the car we need to safely get in and out of our mountain passes in all kinds of weather, a comfortable car for the few longer trips we might take in the next few years. But somehow, the thrill of that first new car just isn't in the one we just brought home.

We know that in a few weeks, even the new appearance will be gone. The floor mats will be shades of Goose Creek mud. An assortment of small change, pharmaceutical company ballpoints, and Cheerios will be irrevocably lodged between the seats and the console. By the end of this week, the exterior will be the color of our road (we chose gold as a body color figuring this was a good match to road dust). And it is almost certain that the right front quarter panel will at best carry only a few patches of deer hair in the bumper; but more likely, it will show the typical Floyd County Deer Dents of Distinction.

And you know, the Forester doesn't smell new. Just as well. We're too old to be fooled by new-car from a can, too wise to have excessively great expectations that we will find ultimate happiness in another mere thing, however slick at first sight. We'll pray for a hundred thousand safe miles and enough trade-in to do this all over again in five or six years. If we're not in The Home by then, driving around the shuffleboard courts on a pair of shiny scooters. Hers has will have a bell, mine a manly oogaooga horn. ANd they'll cost as much as 'the Poop' of long ago. Beyond that, any final analogies here to new car smell and geriatric scooters is country I am not prepared to drive, hobble, scoot or step in just now. You're welcome.