Cars

My first car was a little blue Corvair.  A Corvair!! The car that made Ralph Nader a household name. Unsafe at any speed. It was dented. It was rusty. It cost $200, and it was mine!  I was sixteen. The car was eight. I got it at a junkyard/used car lot, outside of Walnutport, using money from my elementary school savings account. I don’t think they have those school savings accounts anymore. The account was a little plastic envelope that you put a dollar in and gave to the teacher once a week. That’s how I got my car!

The Corvair was, I think, the first car to have the engine in the back and the trunk in the front. It’s shifter was a little lever on the dashboard that didn’t have a Park. You had to use the emergency brake to put it in park.

But, oh, the adventures I had with my Corvair. Driving through the fields outside of Slatington avoiding the groundhogs. Riding up and down Main Street, Slatington with my friends, radio blasting all that great sixties music! And, of course, parking with my girlfriend on some dirt road that I remember overlooked Victory Park. I drove by there recently and it is paved and full of houses.

One of the phrases under my yearbook picture is “always has car trouble”. That may stem from one particular incident at school. I had long lost the key to the trunk of my Corvair, and therefore access to the spare tire and the fuse box didn’t exist. We were all sitting in English class one afternoon and we heard a car horn blaring, and blaring, and blaring. I’m a little nervous because it sounded like my car. It was my car! For some reason, the car horn went off by itself and could apparently only be stopped by pulling out the fuse, the fuse in the inaccessible trunk. It was decided by the principal and the driver training instructor that I either had to call a mechanic or let the battery die. Knowing that the battery wasn’t doing well either, we let it blare until it stopped, sometime in History class. How embarrassing!

I now drive a Kia Soul which serves the purpose of getting me from one place to another. But I think of my Corvair often. I last saw it when it died on the edge of the woods at my girlfriend’s grandmother’s farm. For all I know it is still there, dreaming of it’s adventures with me.