For a car guy, nothing touches deeper in your soul than your first car.
Whatever it may be - slow, fast, unreliable or perfectly in tune - we reminisce about this vehicle no matter where we are in life.
The lust for your first car, unless you’ve been one of the lucky few to hold on to theirs, is like a heroin junkie 20 years down the road still chasing their first high. Your first car is an elusive vehicle that disappeared the minute you decided to trade up to something “a bit more sensible.”
Mine was a 1993 Volvo 940 Wagon, the basic model with the four-cylinder engine cranking out a heart pumping 114 horsepower. Painted refrigerator white with a brown cloth interior, “Valanche,” as I called her, was anything from a looker. I’ve seen paint dry faster than this car could reach 60 miles per hour.
The stereo was completely shot. One day I was playing an old Frank Sinatra tape my dad owned and blew out the right rear speaker. Furthermore, the wiring on the inside of the stereo head unit was damaged to the point where I could get 30 clear seconds out of the speakers before they would short out and I would have to smack the side of the center console to get sound back. A bit of the front bumper was dangling loose from when I had ambitiously rounded a corner coming home from work in the middle of January and slid straight into a snow pile. The Volvo had all the faults and foibles you would expect from a 21-year-old car, but in truth they never really bothered me.
What the Volvo became most of all, was a friend. This friend was silent, said nothing, and did nothing other than accompany me places. I cried tears of joy and pain in this car. I sang at the top of my lungs and yelled in anger. I asked two girls out while driving this car, and this car drove me home after the break-ups.
I did stupid stuff too. On a dry summer evening my friends and I drove around launching bottle rockets out the window. One of them misfired, shooting sparks into the car, lighting my pants and the seat on fire! I could dispose of the pants, but the burn marks were permanent. So was the check engine light. One summer day I drove the Volvo for 15 minutes without the radiator working and burned the solenoid that controlled the light. On snowy winter nights I would tie my friends to the back of the car and tow them around my neighborhood while they sat on sleds being pelted by the fresh snow repelling off my traction-less rear tires.
For all the times I spent going “man if only I had the turbo model,” or “I wish I could trade this in for a used Mercedes,” there were a million smiles, shared moments of laughter, grievances, emotions and lasting memories created within that car. No matter what I am driving later in my life, be it a Beater or a Benz, nothing can replace my Volvo wagon.
