Car Stories
I’ve been driving now for nearly 39 years. That’s a long time and yet, during those 39 years I’ve only owned a total of five cars, and technically, four of them have been trucks. The current model, a gray Toyota Tacoma, has only 4000 miles on it. Because it’s relatively new, the gray truck does not yet have a lot of stories to tell. But that is not the case for the four cars that preceded it.
The gray Tacoma replaced the black Tacoma that I drove for the previous thirteen years. I bought the black one in 2001. It was the first car I bought when we moved to Connecticut and it came with 4-wheel drive, which was great in the snow. It had a 5-speed manual transmission and what Toyota called an “extended cab.” The extended cab had plenty of room for my then young children. I remember thinking that I would probably have that truck for at least ten years and I was right. Actually, were it not for some rust on the frame, I’d likely still be driving it. It was a great truck but it was not the smartest thing I ever bought. There were some things I’d failed to take into account. The first was the kids. I don’t know what they were eating but somehow (and I’m told now that all kids do this), they grew. A lot. So much so that the back seat of the “extended cab” was now a torture chamber on even the shortest of trips. And not only did they grow, they turned sixteen (again this apparently is a common occurrence). And it seems all children are preprogramed to want to drive some 20 minutes after turning sixteen. Teaching a kid to drive is hard enough, but with a 5-speed manual transmission, it’s a nightmare. So in hindsight, the black Tacoma was perhaps not the best idea.
If the kids had a hard time with the black Tacoma, they would have had an even worse time with its predecessor, the 1993 red Toyota Tacoma. The red Tacoma, the first new car I ever owned, did not have an extended cab. It did not have an extended anything. In fact, it didn’t even have an “anything.” This was what they called a “strippee”, as in totally stripped down. It was a mere $7000 out the door and came with no power steering, no air-conditioning, no power windows, no radio, no, as I said, “anything.” I’m actually surprised it came with tires. I remember the salesman asked me if I wanted a rear bumper. “What?” I said. “Of course I want a bumper. Doesn’t it come with one?” It didn’t. For an extra $150, they threw a box with the bumper in the back and I put it on myself when I got home. When we moved to Connecticut, I sold the red truck to a friend who still has it and it’s now got over 200,000 miles on it.
The red Tacoma had replaced the white Mazda truck I’d driven before that. My father-in-law had given the Mazda to my wife when he took a job overseas and she gave it to me when she bought a new car. Between the two of us, we put a lot of miles on the Mazda, which equals lots of stories. It’s the truck in which we drove across the country. It’s the one we huddled in during the biggest thunderstorm ever (seriously, ever!) in South Dakota; It’s the one that broke down in Wisconsin right in front of a Mazda dealer; And the one I learned to drive a manual transmission in. Like the red truck, I sold this one to a friend, this time for a whole $100. But unlike the red truck, the Mazda lasted only a few more months before becoming scrap metal.
Before the Mazda, when I was somewhere in my twenties, I purchased my first car, a very used 1974 green Datsun 710 wagon. I bought it from a woman I worked with named Andrea. She sold it to me for a whopping $600. Andrea had been a huge fan of bumper stickers and had not limited the placement of those stickers to the bumper.
The entire rear of the car was covered with stickers promoting a variety of issues that Andrea felt strongly about. I am not a fan of bumper stickers so naturally, the first thing I did was scrape them off. It wasn’t that I wasn’t supportive of her causes, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to be tooling around in a car reading, among other things, “Women Opposed to Nuclear Technology.”
While the red truck had absolutely no extras to speak of, the green Datsun came with several features that were somewhat unique. The one I enjoyed the most involved the key. Whenever I had a passenger in the car, and the little wagon was careening down the freeway, I’d tell the poor passenger that the car had an odd feature. Then, much to the passenger’s horror, I’d grab the key and pull it from the ignition, and still, the car kept going. I don’t recall how I discovered that the car ran smoothly with or without the key but I did create a lot of consternation with it. That consternation was exacerbated by one of the other features. Quite simply, the car had no seatbelts. They’d been removed by whomever Andrea had bought it from.
Despite it’s deathtrap qualities, I loved the little green wagon. I didn’t care about the hole in the floor allowing one to see the pavement below. I found it amusing (but only slightly) when the radiator exploded on the Bay Bridge. And could only laugh when, just days after having it painted (the old Earl Scheib $99 paintjob), an ancient woman whose first car may have been a Model T, plowed into it while making a turn. Throughout all of that I somehow managed to put 50,000 miles on it before selling it to a friend for $300.
I’m sure the gray Tacoma will amass a number of stories in the coming years, although it will be hard to top the stories of its forerunners, especially those of the green Datsun. I suppose I could help it along by removing the seat belts. But that seems so, I don’t know, dangerous? Perhaps a better option would be to simply get some bumper stickers. Now if could just find one that reads, “Men Opposed to Bumper Stickers.”
