Hey! You! Get Into My Car.

When I was in high school, my parents gave me my first car – a 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with blue velvet interior. When we pulled up to our house in Levittown and I saw the car parked there, I asked if someone was visiting. “It’s for you, kid,” said my dad (my dad talks like Humphrey Bogart in my imagination). In my 17 years on the planet, this was the best gift anyone had ever given me. I literally started screaming and dancing on the front lawn as if Ed McMahon had just presented me with an oversized check. To me, a car meant freedom. Freedom to visit my friends’ houses without asking mom for a ride. Freedom to put my collection of free stickers from local radio stations on an actual bumper. Freedom to fill my trunk with firewood in preparation for a much fantasized about but never realized bonfire at Jones Beach.

Now that I live in Brooklyn, there’s no reason for me to have a car. Everything I need is pretty much within walking distance and there’s a bus stop and a subway station within 100 yards of my front door. Still, a part of me longs to get behind the wheel. So when my dad recently offered me one of the family cars he was getting rid of, I got excited.

Sure, there are drawbacks to owning a car in the city. There’s the cost of insurance and gas, and the perennial problem of where to park it. When renting a car last summer for a week, I became aware of something called “alternate side of the street parking.” I quickly realized that this is a game of “Car Tetris” in which you attempt to fit your vehicle into a space big enough for a Vespa while trying to keep other cars from boxing you in. If you are lucky enough to find a “good” spot, you do not move your car. Ever. Again.

But then there are the reasons it would be awesome to have a car. If I had a car I could actually drive in the fast lane while listening to the Eagles’ “Life in the Fast Lane.”
I could make that “pull” signal to truck drivers, asking them to honk their horn. (I found out that when you do this outside a motor vehicle, they tend to think you are either crazy or offering them sexual favors). If I had my own car, I could just totally drive to Canada, like right now.

When I told my husband about the car offer, he said that it was impractical, another unnecessary expense. I pointed out that if we had a car we could do what most couples with cars do on the weekends – go to Costco. Immediately my husband began imagining his favorite groceries in comically big value sizes. I told him that there was plenty of room in the trunk for a vat of Skippy smooth peanut butter and a 12-pack of Cheerios. And who knows, there may even be a little room for some firewood back there, too.