A love story.

"Ike" (untitledcarshow) 09/29/2014 at 16:54 • Filed to: Life and love

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How I learned to love cars.

I am the middle child the family (don't worry this is going somewhere) with a older brother and a younger sister. I was the kind of kid always taking apart and putting everything back together (well it looked good enough, it may not have worked the way it did before I got my hands on it). I would spend hours in my parents basement doing that, or working on a small model rail road town I couldn't never be quite right. My older brother (Frank) was all about putting models together mostly of cars and planes. We would spend hours in isolation in my parents basement during long Chicago winters and after school, my brother was always much better at me putting together models and painting them, (I had really terrible hand eye coordination from some really had ear infections as an infant, so this and video games were my therapy).

Then it happened right around the age of 13 when I started to rebel against everything that my brother liked, right as he was hitting driving age, and with that my next few years we're spent in a fog of "cars are just a way of getting from A to B, I don't care when I get my drivers licenses"

I hit 16 and started drivers ed at summer school, (my birthdate is in June, so it was when I could). I sat thru the boring lectures and the sims, and just fought sleep, not caring much and never asking to drive in the parents boring Taurus or conversion van. Then it came time to drive the saturn at drivers ed, I don't remember where we drove, I do remember being so nervous I would wreck, and kill us all in the car. I fought the nerves and it was almost over before it began, of so it seemed. I was hooked and I didn't know it. Drivers ed came and went, and I had to get my hours up to go take the test; I enjoyed it. I really did, and then when I could test finally FINALLY, almost 6 months later, on the way to the testing center, a lady almost t-boned me at a light; then all the nerves, and worry and doubt came back, my mother assured me that she ran the red, it wasn't my fault, and for sure it wasn't but it didn't matter. I passed the test, but I didn't want to drive any more, I bought a crappy car from my aunt that was 11 years old,(a 93 tracer and was falling apart, I would take the car the half mile to work, and the mile or so to school, but no where else. Slowly ever so slowly I built up the never to drive more and more, and soon my parents for my death trap of a car was nearing it's end, and when I had to emergency brake in a bad Chicago winter storm, and broke the breaks, and barely made it home. The time had come to get a new car.

My first real proper car was a 2004 saturn Ion.

It was a drivers ed car before I had it, (one of the cars in the fleet at my school, had I driven this car before?) you could feel the plate welded to cover the brake pedal in the passenger seat footwell thru the carpet. My dad found the car, we worked out a good deal and I was on the road in a newish car. It was amazing, I loved it, it had 500 miles when I bought it and 250k when I sadly sold it years later. That saturn saw me thru 2 moves, it held everything I owned when I moved out of my parents and went a 100 miles south for my first foray in adulthood in Normal IL, and it held everything I owned when I found my first professional job in Washington, D.C. I loved the car, it wasn't fast(thought I thought it was) it wasn't smooth or drove nice of really had any redeeming qualities as a car. But damn it it was mine, and it was perfect for me. I Remember when i knew I loved it, I had just dropped off my girlfriend at the time off at her parents house, and I was in a good mood and driving like a teenager does, and I hit a curb, it went over the edge with the front tire, and then pulled it back over the curb, and I had wrecked the entire from passenger side linkage, the car was un-drive-able. My first thought wasn't oh my parents are gonna find out my girlfriend was over at the house while they were away, or they are gonna kill me for wrecking the car. It was, oh no the car, I could drive for the next few weeks my family had left for Florida, I had 3 other cars to drive. But if didn't matter I wanted my car fixed, it pained me to go check on it in the shop. I wanted to see her fixed, it had become a living breathing, thing to me. It had it's own personality, and I had hurt it, I broke it, I felt awful. When I got it back a few weeks later, it was like an old friend had returned.

So ends the tale of how I fell in love with a car, my next installment, will be how I fell in love with cars as a whole.

If you want some more of this listen to my podcast.

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RazoE > Ike 09/29/2014 at 17:25

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Well written. I can relate BIG TIME. It's a bit scary, actually.

Ike > RazoE 09/29/2014 at 17:45

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well I'm glad to hear, yeah all sorts of different ways to become a car guy I think it's in our DNA