Cars of a Bygone Era

As I was driving home and mindlessly fiddling with MP3 player, texting on my cell phone, eating a foot long sandwich and making an obscene gesture at a lovely elderly woman who apparently had forgotten that her car was equipped with a blinker and was evidently unaware that in the not to distant past America instituted something called the lane system, wherein each driver has a designated horizontal space in which to maneuver their vehicle, I observed in front of me a great classic vehicle from my childhood. The driver in front of me had somehow got his hands on an automobile believed by most, including yours truly, to be extinct:

The Pea Green Station Wagon With Wood Panel Sides

The greatest thing that came to my memory about this specific car was that on some of the models the third row of seats (which was actually the back side of the second row if my memory serves me correctly) actually faced out the back of the car, affording the passengers an unparalleled view through the large picture window. Even with the view being an excellent attribute to this seating position, the back seat was the least coveted position imaginable. When I was a child, this was the punishment seat for unruly, disgruntled children to which my sibling and I were banished to by our heartless parents. Our car actually had lap belts in those seats, and we were ordered to stay in them, lest we would discover the torture that would befall us if our father “had to pull this car over”. When my sibling and I would argue, or incessantly ask if we were there yet, my parents had the option of placing us in the back seat, thereby creating the greatest possible physical distance between us and them. By making us remain in our lap belts, it was difficult to turn around, which afforded them the pleasure of not having to see our tortured, little faces that were distorted from several minutes of crying, and rather they could pretend everything was fine by only having to see the mundane backs of our heads in the review mirror. Given that we had to face away from the front seat dignitaries, coupled with loud music and the fact that we were seated as far as possible from our parental units, we were subjected to an acoustical nightmare which rendered our constant pleas for food, water and bathroom breaks mute (let’s at least go along with the pretense that they could not hear us, and that they weren’t secretly just ignoring us). The more I thought about that heinous back seat, the more I cringed inside, and desperately wanted to reminisce about a more pleasant car from my childhood. The funny thing is that the only cars that would come to the forefront of my mind were cars that, in today’s world, would be considered gross safety hazards on wheels.

The Datsun 240Z

This little death trap belonged to my mother around the time I was probably six or seven years old. These were the grand times of lax safety laws which entitled an adult to not only endanger their own safety by not wearing safety belts, but also the liberty to play vehicular Russian Roulette with their children as well. I have no other explanation for my mother’s lack of regard for the safety of her two sons other than somewhere she must have read an ad, or possibly the owner’s manual, that recommended that the small hatchback portion of the car could be used for a small suitcase, a bag of golf clubs, or possibly two juvenile males. Day after day on the way to school I sat in that match-box sized space closer in proximity than one brother should be to another, in all actuality never probably realizing the possibility that all it would take would be for some other driver, in a car only slightly bigger than ours, to lose focus and come careening into our fragile cocoon, causing my brother and I to be the first documented case of accident-induced Siamese Twinism. But yet, here I am unscathed after all those dangerous rides. I guess mother’s do know best.

 

Big Ol’ Pickup Truck

During the spring and summertime I played baseball in the few years approaching my tenth birthday. After getting our free watered down soda from the marginally sanitary snack shack after the game, I remember jumping, without a care in the world, into the bed of my dad’s unshelled truck. Like the 240Z, there were no seat belts in the back of the truck, and no pesky laws at the time requiring them. Seat belts were reserved for the first-class passengers in the cab of the truck. I recall engaging in a little maneuver I liked to call the Actuary’s Nightmare (OK, so maybe it was not called that then. I did not even know what an actuary was until I was like 25). As if riding in the bed of the truck was not dangerous enough in itself, I exponentially increased the risk factor by sitting on the wheel well placing my center of gravity precariously higher than the side of the truck while sticking my head over the side and looking down at the menacing road which loomed only a few feet away as we motored down the road at 40-50 miles per hour. Not only did sitting on the wheel well place me higher, therefore becoming more susceptible to being plastered in the face by 100 mile an hour mosquito missiles and flying pebble projectiles launched by the wheels of cars in front of us, I was also stupidly subjecting myself to the possibility of being thrown out of the truck due to a sudden swerve or unforeseen pothole, which would have scraped off my joy-filled, youthful face, and left in its place a countenance most closely resembling uncooked hamburger with little rocks and pebbles imbedded in it.
I am simply thankful that despite the repeated ill-advised flaunting of my bravado in the face of certain danger in the bed of the truck, and the hazard-laden rides in the cramped back seat of the 240Z, nary an injury did I suffer during my adventures in the cars of my childhood.