So Long, Dan

                I’m not thoroughly understanding why I’m taking IndyCar driver Dan Wheldon’s death so hard, but I am.   I didn’t know him.  Never met the man.  Just watched him drive and live with glee and joy and enthusiasm.

                And now, he’s gone.

                I got so bored watching the ABC announcers yapping during the forever-long red flag period during today's race that I went upstairs to take a nap.  It was during that time that my 11-year-old, Nick, came in to tell me that a buddy of mine had just called.  Dan had died.

                I had DVR’d the race, and was able to watch the now-riveting parts of the ABC coverage that I’d missed.  I saw the announcement of Dan’s death, the crying of the other drivers and teams, the five-lap tribute (during which they played “Danny Boy,” of all things).

                During all this while, there were NFL games on other channels.  I love football, too.  I thought of all the times I’d seen an NCAA or NFL guy go down with an injury and heard the announcers get all serious, the players kneeling in prayer.  But those guys don’t die.

                In racing, they do.

                I love racing.  IndyCar, in particular.  The cars are so fast, so sleek, so cutting-edge and beautiful.  Nothing in sports eclipses the glory of the Indy 500.  But those open wheels . . . oh, those open wheels.  In Cars 2, female cars swooned over the open wheels of the Italian-sounding F1 character.  But those darned, sticking-right-out-there wheels—the nonsensical, aerodynamically unsound grandfathered-in homage to Indy’s early days, when they’d strip the fenders off of road cars to make them lighter and faster—have proven time and again to be horrifically dangerous.  Wheels touch, often on the counter-rotating leading and trailing sides, and carnage ensues.

                Nothing surpasses the beauty and sleekness of an IndyCar.  These slim, hyper-powered darts are the essence of motorsports.  But something has to change.  Ironically—and tragically—a new IndyCar chassis is in the pipeline for next year.  It’s a car Dan Wheldon test drove repeatedly—going so far as to jokingly call himself a “crash-test dummy” for the new chassis.  It features fairings that essentially enclose the rear wheels, reducing the likelihood of the very sort of wreck that cost him his life today.

                I keep seeing Dan’s photo from his Indy 500 victory this year—the one where he’s posed at the start-finish line with his wife, two-year-old and newborn.  The racing community and its fans loved this little Brit.  With his passion for racing, his impish smile and engaging personality, he’s the exact sort racing fans always love to see win.

                Godspeed, Dan Wheldon.  Grace and peace to you, your family and friends.  As the weeks and months pass, may we learn the lessons you taught us.

In A Good Place

            I just got my long-serving GTO back following two days in the shop having various services performed, and I realized a couple of things:  First, the old girl’s still got it; second, I am in a really comfy place with this car right now, and I’m not sure I’m prepared to leave it just yet.

            At six years old and with 80,000 miles on the odometer, the Goat has been my road partner longer than any car I’ve owned.  We’ve had a lot of fun together, and I still look forward to driving it each day.

Ironically, you’d never have seen that coming if you’d been there when I bought it.  At the time, see, I was in a love-hate relationship with a 2001 Corvette that owned me more than I owned it.  The Vette had been a financial reach.  With a second child on the way, it also was a badly timed decision.  It was so pretty and so glorious and so danged expensive that all I ever did was worry about it.  Commuting was a butt-clenching, white-knuckled nightmare, as I was incessantly fearful that every rotating tire on the road was about to toss up a rock.  I therefore put a mask on the car, which naturally led to washing the car every week, which led to vacuuming out the inside of the mask so the built-up dust wouldn’t chafe the paint.  And heaven help me when I took the car in for service:  Fearful that all the mechanics would conspire to drop tools on my car or open its doors into pillars, I often insisted that I be permitted to watch them work.  They loved that.

Ultimately, I was so scared to use the car as a car that I bought a used vehicle—a Chevy Astro van, no less—to serve as daily transport.  Even at the time, the irony was not lost on me: For the sake of my mental health, I—a car guy—was driving an utterly joyless vehicle while an incredibly rewarding sports car sat unused in my garage.

When the sheer absurdity of this arrangement became too much to bear, I bought the GTO.  Traded in both vehicles and actually made $12 on the deal.

The Goat’s looks didn’t inspire the lust or passion that the Corvette’s did, and it didn’t have the single-minded purpose that a pure sports car has, but it was the only GM product on the market at the time (the old Camaro was out of production, and the new one was still a twinkle in a designer’s eye) that fit my triune affordable-fast-fun requirements.  Besides, it had the same torquey LS2 V8 that Chevrolet was dropping into Corvettes.  My purchase, then, was made in a “This’ll do” frame of mind.

I’m sorry, my friend:  That’s how I thought of you back then.

As time has gone on, though, this car has endeared itself to me.  It’s also taught me a thing or two about what real, sustainable happiness is about.  For instance, isn’t it interesting how passion, for all its pulsating glory, makes such a poor companion over the long haul, but how a decent long-haul companion occasionally surprises you with passion?  And isn’t it enlightening to discover how a subtle form grows more beautiful when its function—its inner nature—proves its worth time and again?  And isn’t just plain being content a deep, deep joy denied to those whose only pursuit is passion?  You have to be in a special place to see these things, I think, and the GTO helps me see them.

Years ago, I read a book on Corvette history in which the author described the waning years of the third-generation Corvette—a model that was around from 1968 all the way to 1982, as “a comfortable senescence.”  I like that term, “senescence.”  It’s a graceful way to say, “The state of being old,” but in a warm, sweet, On Golden Pond kind of way.   I’m in a comfortable senescence with my GTO, and it’s good.

Yeah, I know I’ll replace it one day and begin this whole process anew.  I know I’ll go through that butt-clenching, white-knuckle phase.  And I’ll miss the GTO.  But the proof that I’ve actually learned something from her will come when I realize, I’m at that comfy stage again! 

I just pray it doesn’t take six years.

Short Trip, Long Journey

            My eldest son, Jake, could kick my butt at any driving video game out there.  But his first short stint behind the wheel of an actual car showed him just how different a pixilated car is from its non-virtual cousin.

            Jake’s been driving with me, of course, since the beginning.  I still remember how terrified I was on the trip home from the hospital.  I wanted to plaster our car with “Baby on Board” signs and have a police escort clear all the intersections.  Later, when he started enjoying Hot Wheels and other car toys, we began going for drives—first in my 1994 Camaro Z28, then in the 2001 Corvette that followed, and most recently in the 2005 GTO.  I’ve had a manual transmission all along, and Jake has progressed from placing a chubby little left hand under mine on the gearshift to actually changing the gears for me.

            The past few months, whenever I’m outside washing the car or working in the garage, Jake has begged to be allowed to move the car.  He’s sure he knows the drill of starting and moving the car, and will lay out the process step-by-step to prove it.  Regardless, I always say no.  Reciting the steps and doing the steps aren’t the same.  We let him start my wife’s auto-tranny SUV, but that’s a whole different deal.

            The other day, however, Jake got the jump on me.  He and I were going to go someplace on a weekend.  I was still putting my shoes on when he grabbed my keys and ran out the door into the garage.  I heard the garage door going up and thought I had at least a few seconds to finish tying my sneaker, but the boy was fast: I heard the GTO roar to life, then a screech, then nothing.

            I ran out the door and saw the car sitting about four feet rearward from where it had been parked, motor no longer running.  Jake was in the driver’s seat hanging onto the steering wheel, eyes wide, speechless.  I ran around the far side of the car to see if he’d come in contact with the edge of the garage opening.  No, but he was scant inches from it. 

Returning to the driver’s door, I tried to think of something to say.  I believe my first words were, “What the heck!?”

Jake finally started speaking, and the words tumbled out.  “I did everything right!  I put the clutch in and started it, but the car just jumped back!  I did everything right!  I didn’t give it any gas at all.  I don’t know what happened!”

It was then that I noticed the short skid marks ahead of each tire, and I put it together.  “Jake, did you move the seat forward before starting the car?”  He hadn’t.  Now, Jake’s tall for a 13-year-old, but not quite my height yet.  He simply hadn’t been able to keep his clutch foot all the way to the floor.  He may have lost focus, he may have wiggled or shifted—who knows?  But it was enough.  The GTO’s 400-horsepower engine doesn’t require any gas to get the car rolling—let up the clutch and it goes.  When it started backward, Jake panicked and braked, stalling the car.  “You just hit the brakes without putting in the clutch, didn’t you?” I asked.  Jake nodded.

When it comes to the boys and the doing of bad deeds, I’ve become much angrier over offenses that were far less grievous.  Considering this particular misstep involved my car, I’d have expected to be much more upset than I was.  As it happens, I mostly just felt relief that both Jake and the car were okay.  And the look that remained on Jake’s face told me that my yelling at him wouldn’t teach him anything he hadn’t already figured out for himself.  “You did the best thing you could’ve done, hitting the brakes like that,” I said.  Jake nodded, got out of the car, and walked inside.

That’s been a few weeks ago now, and he hasn’t pestered me for the keys once.

But he will.  That short trip inside the garage will become part of a longer journey, and we’ll write the next chapter in our driving history.

           

Confessions of a Coaster

            According to news reports, $4-a-gallon gas is radically changing my driving behavior.

            Within the past week, the talk radio station I listen to (as I commute in my 18-miles-a-gallon car) featured yet another “gas pains” story.  In this one, a dealer in electric cars was crowing about his long waiting list.  There were also the requisite sound bites from angry gas station customers explaining how they’re combining errands, carpooling and eliminating unnecessary trips.

The message is clear: like some petrochemical Black Plague, this bug is going to get all of us sooner or later.  We’re going to be different, and it’s just a matter of time.

It’s of grave concern, therefore, that I report some odd, uncharacteristic behavior behind the wheel of late.  Yes, it’s true:  I fear I’m coming down with this thing.  But before I describe this change, let’s talk about what’s not happening.

It’s not changing how I react to green traffic lights:  All too often, I’m still living The Secret Life of Walter “John Force” Mitty, imagining every light is a drag strip Christmas tree, every launch a test of my reaction time, every other driver a rival.

It’s not affecting my cornering.  As turns approach, I still fancy myself trailing Helio Castroneves into the final turn at the Long Beach Grand Prix, needing to trail-brake and execute a perfect heel-toe downshift in order to come out of the turn under power and pass Helio for the checkered flag.

It’s not stopping me from my occasional lunchtime Drives to Nowhere, taken solely for the way that a fun, engaging car rewards the senses.

Shoot—even a ticket the other day for doing 56 in a 45 didn’t change me.  Within an hour of being cited, I caught myself three times hitting speeds higher than I was ticketed for.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I don’t have a bottomless gasoline budget.  No one died and left me an oil well.  I don’t like spending 60 bucks for 15 gallons of premium unleaded any better than the next car guy.  To support my habit, I’m taking sack lunches to work every day and trying to spend less on other things.  Driving is just too fun, too essential a part of my day, to give up.

Still, I’m changing, and here’s how: When coming up on a red light, instead of just letting up on the gas and allowing the engine to help with the braking, I’m now actually taking my manual-transmissioned car out of gear and . . . coasting.

That’s right.  Hi, my name is Rob, and I’m a coaster.

I’m not sure exactly how things got this way.  At first it was just every once in a while, you know?  It seemed so harmless: Hey, there’s a red light ahead and I’m still kinda far away.  Wonder what my RPMs would be if I just popped it out of gear?  Wow!  They dropped from 2,000 to 400!

It was only a novelty until, curious, I checked the digital mileage calculator on the dash:  3,000 miles per gallon!

Okay, it wasn’t that high.  But close.

Then, as I contemplated the potential cumulative benefits of conserving all of those wasted RPMs by repeatedly rolling up to red lights with the engine disconnected from the wheels, it started happening more and more.  A quarter-mile of rolling here, an eighth-mile there, and pretty soon I was racking up some serious MWPs (Miles Without Power).

Even though I’m exhibiting this disturbing behavior, there is some consolation.  Call it “rationalizing” if you must, but the way I figure it, I can redeem all of these MWPs at the other end, see, when the light turns green.  One pays for the other, right?  Right?  Oh, c’mon someone—tell me I’m not in denial!

Ugh.  I sincerely hope I haven’t disillusioned anyone. 

Backing Up Your Bumper Sticker

            I’ve long had an aversion to any and all bumper stickers, and for several reasons.

            For one thing, they’re ugly and mess up your car.  For another, I really don’t feel the need to proclaim anything about myself to strangers on the highway.  Considering my fondness for acceleration—not to mention the borderline-juvenile glee with which I’ve been known to dispatch slower cars ahead of me—I figure I don’t need anything making me more memorable.

            Recently, however, I’ve had to reexamine this disdain for stickers.  Why?  Because my church has been handing them out.  It’s a discreet little window sticker—innocuous white letters stating “Central Christian Church” on a clear background.  I see them all over the place, and every time I do I think, “Hey, friend!  I go there, too!”  In the middle of a busy commute or a hectic workday, it’s nice to look over and see a fellow church member in the next lane.

But here’s the rub: I’m chicken to put the sticker in my window on account of how I drive.

I mean, it’d be bad enough having people think nasty things about my employer, my alma mater or my political party as they’re watching the back end of my car zoom away, but my church?  Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think I’m a jerk on the road.  I try to be considerate to everyone.  But I know darned well that there are times when my, um . . . exuberance . . . might leave a bad impression.  Just sayin’.  And at such times, it would just seem weird to communicate, in essence, “Hey!  If you enjoyed having your doors blown off just now, come to church Sunday and meet more people like me!”

This all resurfaced just yesterday when a coworker—a good Catholic and a first-rate husband and father—shared a story about his aggravating drive to work.  It seems he’d been in the left lane of the freeway in his BMW 3-series when a man slightly ahead and to his right changed lanes and got right in front of him . . . and slowed down.  Adding injury to irritation, this inconsiderate rolling roadblock then turned on his windshield washers, which missed his windshield entirely and arced right over his roof, dousing my coworker’s clean car.

When the opportunity presented itself, my friend passed his assailant and returned fire.  (Question: Are anyone’s windshield washers aimed right?)  This game of lane-change leapfrog continued when the slow guy—who now was laughing and visibly enjoying himself—suddenly found his accelerator, passed my friend and hosed him down a second time.

No word on whether either car sported a bumper sticker, but wouldn’t the whole thing have been funnier if there’d been a “WWJD” or “My child was student of the week” sticker involved?

            Lots has been written about how much braver some folks are in their cars than in their own skin.  Funny what two tons of metal, plastic and glass will do for the psyche, isn’t it?  Funny, too, how there’s often an inverse relationship between the braggadocio of the vehicle and the character of the person behind the wheel.  Reminds me of that saying about suddenly acquired wealth: “If you’re a jerk when you’re poor, you’ll be a bigger jerk with money.”   Bottom line, we’ll do things bumper to bumper that we’d never dream of doing face to face.  It’s a shame, really, and it’s something my conscience reminds me of every time I express my irritation on the expressway.

            After he’d told his tale, my co-worker and I had a laugh plotting various ways he could get revenge on his freeway attacker if he ever encountered him again.  Eventually, though, I just shook my head and advised him to let it go and be the bigger man.  To his credit, he did and he was.

Hm.  Wonder if my church has any more of those stickers?

Do What You Love

                I freely confess that I’m kind of a whack-job when it comes to washing my car.  There is The Way, and then there are all the other ways.

                Which are wrong.

                I honestly believe that the two scariest things in life are A) having a car full of kids park next to you, and B) allowing someone else to wash your car.

                You heard me right: Nobody but nobody washes my car but me.  I have never, ever been to a car wash.  Ever.  Those high school kids at the corner gas station washing cars to raise money for band?  Ha!  As if.  Go flail your arms at some other sucker.

                I thought my philosophy on this subject was clear to everyone, especially my family.  Which is why I was thunderstruck when my 13-year-old, Jake, asked if he could wash my car yesterday.

                How do you answer the unanswerable?  I was in the front yard working on the lawn when Jake asked.  As the question lingered in the air and I stood there, speechless, I thought, Shoot, why not ask if you can give me a haircut with a hacksaw?

                Now, to fully appreciate the irony of Jake’s question, I have to back up a step.  While this was going on, see, my nine-year-old, Nicholas, was across the street applying white paint to the trunks of my neighbor Wes’s citrus trees.  It was a job Wes had asked Jake to do, but not even the promise of twenty dollars could coax Jake into doing it.  He had done this job once before, and it had two fatal counts against it:  First, it took place in the morning—a time of day to which Jake reacts as though he were a vampire; and second, it was work.  I had assumed my whole morning was going to consist of puttering around in the yard while keeping an eye on Nick.  And now, this?

                “Jake, no,” I said, simply.

                “Why not?” he asked.

                “Because I have a certain way I do it,” I answered, in a tone I hoped would convey, That is just about the stupidest thing you ever asked me.

                But Jake persisted.  “Well, then can I clean the inside with that spray?” he asked.  And even as he posed the question, a sliver of regret stabbed me.  Jake was showing an interest in cars, and I was squashing it.  Still, couldn’t he learn to clean a car on . . . oh, I don’t know . . . a donor car?  My wife’s car?  Something experimental?

                I squelched my natural inclination to say “no” to everything and reminded myself that I’m not nearly as attached to my car’s interior as to its paint.  Spritzing the dash and seats with interior detailer and drying it off with a microfiber towel seemed harmless enough, so I gave Jake my blessing, breathed a silent prayer and returned to my lawn, counting on the drone of the lawnmower motor to drown out my anxiety.

                I emptied the grass bag several times, and each time I passed the open garage door I glanced inside.  Seeing one or the other car doors open every time I walked by, I was amazed at how long Jake stuck to the job.  It may have been the longest he's ever stuck to anything, come to think of it.

                Finally, I heard him calling out to me.  “Dad, come see.”

                I took a breath and went to look.

                There was Jake, in the back seat, having wiped down every leather, plastic or vinyl surface in the car.   The dash was clean, the instrument panel was clean, the seats were clean . . . all of it.  “Oh, and look,” Jake said.  “I even got all the dirt off the pedals.”  I looked: Brake, clutch and accelerator were aluminum-colored jewels.  There was no dirt or dust anywhere.

                And nothing was broken.

                When I got in my car this morning to drive to church and my butt squeaked in my squeaky-clean seat and my feet kept slipping off of my oh-so-clean pedals, I realized something: Jake doesn’t have a problem with work.  He’d spent an hour cleaning the interior of my car, and he’d made no money doing it.  He just needed the same thing we all need: Motivation.

                "Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life," goes the saying.  Well, it’s fine with me if cars are what Jake loves.  They’re a good place to start.

By Extension

            There are lots of memorable scenes in the 1986 James Cameron movie Aliens, but the one I most enjoy is where Sigourney Weaver dons that mechanized “human forklift” suit and fights the alien.  Suddenly, our vulnerable, 130-pound, flesh-and-blood heroine transforms into a menacing ton or so of steel, hydraulics and pincers that allows her exterior, at long last, to match the kick-butt attitude she’s had all along.

            What’s engaging about that scene, I think, is that it so wonderfully gratifies the inner superhero in all of us—the part that watches a gliding hawk as it banks and swoops and thinks I want to do that, or that sees a cheetah on a nature show, legs all a-blur as it rockets over the savannah, and yearns to experience that kind of personal speed.  When Weaver’s in that suit, you’re like, OH yeah—THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about!

Does that happen a lot to you?  It surely does to me.  On some level, in fact, it’s almost like I believe that I really ought to be able to do these kinds of things; that, in fact, there’s something gone awry somewhere, because the longing is so potent that it’s as though I once upon a time had these abilities, only they’ve somehow been misplaced. 

And I want them back.

It’s a sensation I suspect Mr. Cameron understands, as he followed up that Aliens scene years later with an entire movie—Avatar—devoted to the fantasy of inhabiting a bigger, stronger, faster body that can do things your own body just can’t—that’s you, only more.

When people ask why I like cars so much, I sometimes try to explain this whole car-as-an-extension-of-self thing—typically with limited success.  And I get that.  It’s easier to stuff me into the tried-and-true “speed freak” or “poseur” pigeonholes than to really think about it.  And unfortunately for people like me, there’s a stigmatizing element out there—an element with more money than either sense or taste—that buys the kinds of cars I love in a vain quest to appropriate for themselves qualities they will never, ever personally possess.  Those folks make it tough for true believers.

To a believer, a car’s beauty is something you enjoy during a Saturday morning wash and wax, not when you hop out curbside at a swank, crowded restaurant and toss the keys to a valet.  To a believer, a well-executed heel-and-toe downshift as you turn left from one empty, pre-sunrise boulevard onto another is better than a hundred showy burnouts.  It’s about the communion you feel with the machine; how the two of you, together, do and feel and accomplish more than either of you could alone.   As you wait for the car, the car waits for you.

As my 13-year-old packs on pounds and inches and muscle seemingly overnight, gaining heretofore unimagined sway over the physical world, I can tell he’s already looking at my car and wondering, what would it be like to have . . . even more?  When I was washing my car the other day, in fact, Jake stood to the side begging repeatedly, “Dad, let me pull the car into the garage.  Just into the garaaaaage.  C’mon, pleeeeaze?”  Naturally, I refused.  The last such venture—in my wife’s car, an automatic—resulted in one rocking jolt forward and another rocking jolt backward.  I took the keys and ended that excursion before my wife’s SUV became our new coffee table.

My son’s day will come.  But as we all learned from Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility.  The way I figure it, Jake’s busy enough right now figuring out what to do with hands, feet and shoulders that he’s still growing into.  The forklift suit can wait.  But once he gets it, it’ll be a high-performance driving school for both of us.  I’d like him to become a believer.

Midlife Message

            It has to be 15, maybe 20 years ago that my wife told me something I’ve never forgotten:  “You know, it’ll be hard for people to tell when you’re having a midlife crisis because you’ve always had a sports car.”

            I took assurance from that for years, but as I sit here actually at midlife (assuming I make it to 100), that statement makes me chuckle.  Not because my wife was wrong—she wasn’t.  In our years together I’ve gone through a Firebird, a Camaro, two Corvettes and a late-model GTO, so my recent yearning for the upcoming supercharged Camaro ZL1 strikes no one as particularly mid-lifey.  It just turns out that a succession of fast cars, by itself, doesn’t preclude other observably dumb mid-life behavior.

            In other words, I’m pretty sure people noticed anyway.  Oh well.

            Okay, so that long string of fun cars put me in fine shape to pine for a post-50^th birthday Camaro without raising eyebrows.  But thinking about all those cool cars has revealed a truth about my life that I’m only just now beginning to appreciate: With the exception of those cars, I’ve really been quite a wallflower.

It’s true.  Ironic that I could be so expressive and “out there” with my rides, yet so complacent in other areas.  Too often, I’ve been more of a blender-inner; more Clark Kent than Superman.  Curious.

I had plenty of time to ponder this as I drove my family home from our Disneyland vacation last week.  Driving eastward on I-10, the traffic surrounding me suddenly took on a curious aspect.  Looking around, I discovered the cause:  We were encircled by late-model Toyota Camrys.  There was one ahead of me, one at about two o’clock, another beside me, and yet another a couple lanes over.

I mean no offense to Camry owners.  It’s a perfectly sensible, serviceable car—the right tool for many a basic transportation job.  And Toyota obviously sells the heck out of them.  But seeing four so close together—followed by another identical pair just a mile or so down the road, believe it or not—had me flashing back to that scene in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones where the camera pans over that vast sea of identical, biologically engineered storm troopers.

The rugged individualist in me swelled with pride that I, by golly, did not drive a beige, white or silver sedan.  But just as I was getting smug, I remembered my nice, safe career.  I remembered the white walls in our home that my wife’s been begging me to paint, the relative sameness of the last several years, and the fact that our family’s just-completed Disney trip was the first truly “new” thing we’d done together in ages.

With a jolt, it occurred to me: All too often, I’m more Camry than Camaro.

            Not that everyone has to be a Camaro, a Corvette, a Lambo or a Ferrari.  “We can’t all be heroes,” said Will Rogers, “because somebody has to sit on the curb and applaud when they go by.”  So maybe it’s okay with some folks if they’re the ones who sit on the curb.  Maybe it’s okay for them to be a Camry.

            But I don’t think that’s for me.  In fact, I know it’s not.  Irrespective of one’s budget, it’s always possible to choose exciting over dull.  Even if it’s just paint color, you can do it.  See, my true self, I think, has always been the guy who bought those fun cars.  And now, at 50, I want to take more cues from that true self; I want to make it my mission to be that guy all the time, in every area.  I don’t want to sit on the curb.

            Legendary auto writer David E. Davis Jr., when he founded Automobile magazine years ago, made a promise to all future readers.  His car mag, he said, would feature “no boring cars.”  What if each of us resolved, in like fashion, “No boring life?”  What if we traded in our inner Camry for something memorable, moving, motivating?

           

            Chevrolet, if you’re listening, I’d like to order either a Victory Red or Synergy Green Camaro ZL1 once they’re available.  Put black stripes on it, too.  And Rob, if you’re listening, live so as to be a fitting driver for such a car.  Crisis, schmisis.

Keep Moving Forward

            It’s always interesting when a message comes at you, totally unbidden, from multiple sources at the same time.  I freely confess I’m not very adept at picking up on life’s little breadcrumb trails, but when the breadcrumbs look more like jumbo-sized loaves, I figure it’s time to pay attention.

            Our family spent most of the last week at Disneyland, and we had a wonderful time—such a good time, in fact, that I found myself truly regretting that we’d allowed nearly six years to elapse since our last visit.  The boys, 13 and nine now, had been just seven and four at the time.  All week long I couldn’t stop thinking of that previous trip.  And the one before that, when Nick was an infant, and even the one before that, when Jake was just three and Nick was still on the way.  The boys chuckled when I told the story of how I’d nearly ruined Disneyland for little Jake on that first trip by making Space Mountain our first ride together.  The dark and the fast movements terrified him so much that every other time we got in line for a ride, Jake kept asking, “Is there a . . . a TUNNEL?”  And if there was a tunnel involved, he would patently refuse to go.

            So I spent the first part of this week’s trip looking backward, getting sentimental over days gone by, thinking of how the boys have grown and changed, and regretting . . . what, exactly?  That we hadn’t made more trips to Disneyland?  That somehow I may have missed something somewhere?  Some opportunity to extract the absolute most from my boys’ childhood?  I couldn’t pin down the exact source of my melancholy, but it was there nevertheless.

            But then the trip started to take on its own identity—to have its own catchphrases, its own humorous memories, its own place in the trophy showcase.  Jake—my now-giant, strapping seventh grader—even helped bring me back to the present when we were in line for Space Mountain.  Ten years removed from that initial encounter, Jake got a mischievous grin on his face and asked, “Dad, is there a tunnel?”  I had to laugh.  Jake had made a new memory out of an old one.

            That seemed like a moral in and of itself: That it’s okay to cherish a memory, so long as you don’t neglect to make new ones.  The way is forward, after all, isn’t it?  Always forward.  No matter how much time has passed, no matter how long ago those sweet memories occurred, you have the chance right now to create the things whose memories you’ll be cherishing tomorrow.  It’s an ever-renewing phenomenon.

            Interesting that I ruminated on this while at Disneyland.  It was Walt Disney, after all, who said, “We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”  The park itself is a testament to that philosophy: Favorite old rides (Matterhorn, teacups) remain, but there’s always something new under construction to make you want to come back again.

            While all of that was going on, I’ve been keeping track of a major re-do of the track at Phoenix International Raceway, the one-mile oval just west of Phoenix that we natives like to call “The Jewel in the Desert.”  My friend in the communications department at PIR, Nicole Scheider, has been posting photos of the project, and I have to tell you—they’re hard for me to look at.  They’re not just repaving the place, they’re actually reconfiguring it.  The infield road course will be gone, the front straight will be wider, the turns will be banked more, and the famous “dogleg” on the back straight is being reshaped.  All of that is great, of course, but sentimental slob that I am, I can’t help remembering that the old track is where I saw Mario Andretti win the first IndyCar race I ever attended, back in 1988.  It’s where I got the autographs of Al Unser, Al Unser Jr., Arie Luyendyk, Roger Penske, Emerson Fittipaldi and Eddie Cheever.  I've waved the green flag there, and once I even got to say, "Gentlemen, start your engines!"  Best of all, I drove on that old track surface myself when I twice attended the Richard Petty Driving School.  It's all gone now, chewed up by giant, pavement-munching machines.

            Yet again, though, it was someone else’s enthusiasm for the here-and-now—and the future—that snapped me out of it.  When I expressed my remorse to Nicole, she shot back a message riddled with enthusiasm: “It’s a big dirt track!  Monday starts the digging of the pedestrian tunnels!”  Just as Jake’s good humor had infected me, so did Nicole’s.  Cool! I thought.  Pedestrian tunnels!

            Then, as if to cap off a week of contemplating this topic, I sat in church this morning and listened to a sermon on God keeping his promises.  At one point, the pastor told us to write something down:  “Forward movement is the natural direction of a Christian.”

            That line didn’t seem to have anything to do with anything.  But then the pastor elaborated: “The fulfillment of God’s promises is always out there, forward, ahead of you.  It’s easy to look at everything that’s right here, all around you, and get consumed with that.  But he’s made his promises, see, and he’s out there ahead of you, already fulfilling them.”

            Disneyland.  PIR.  Church.  A curious combination of locations to conspire to teach me something, but conspire they did.  All of them seemed to be muttering a quote I once read: “The past is valuable as a guidepost, but dangerous if used as a hitching post.”  I’m not sure where this trail of breadcrumbs leads, but I’m eager to find out.  Whatever the answer is, I know it’s out there, ahead of me.

To Everything, Turn, Turn

“Dad, how far would you have to turn the wheel to go around that corner?” asked Nicholas, my nine-year-old, as we ran an errand in the GTO.

Wow.  Talk about déjà vu, I thought.  My mind flashed back four decades. . .

“Dad, how far would you have to turn the steering wheel to go around that corner?” I asked my father as the two of us sat in an idling car outside a store.  Mom was inside running an errand.  It was the early 1970s, and I’d have been about 10.

I was very curious about the whole act of driving.  In my child’s mind, I imagined that when a driver approached a corner, it was necessary to know in advance just how much steering was required to negotiate the turn: That’s a right-hand turn, so I must turn the wheel three-quarters of the way around.  The way I reckoned, it was all about pre-calculated actions and results: You moved your foot this far on the gas pedal to get to such-and-such a speed; you pushed the brake this hard to stop before you got to the stop sign. 

Maneuvering a car, therefore, was virtually an act of genius.  I was flabbergasted that Dad did it so easily.

Dad—never one to use more words than absolutely necessary—didn’t address any of that.  He merely looked at the turn I was pointing at, laid a finger alongside a spoke of the steering wheel, and pushed.  “Oh, about that much,” he said, as the ridiculously over-boosted 70s-era power steering allowed him to rotate the wheel about 90 degrees.  I shook my head, amazed that he could catalog all of these innumerable strategies in his brain, retrieving just the right one for just the right circumstance. . .

“Dad?  How far?” queried Nicholas once again.  I returned to the present.  Since the car was moving, I couldn’t use my father’s “about this much” answer.  Instead, I told Nicholas to watch the wheel as I made the right-hand turn.  Once I’d completed it, Nicholas said, “How did you know it was going to be that far?”

Oh, how funny:  Nicholas was thinking of driving just as I had as a child!  As inputs and outputs that you had to plot out in advance!  This was my chance to really explain it as I wished it had been explained to me; to disabuse him at this tender age of a misconception I’d carried until well after I had my first driver’s license.  My mind began to whirr.

“It’s not like that, Nick,” I said.  Unlike my father, I was going to use words.  “You’re not really thinking consciously, ‘Oh, I’m gonna turn the wheel this far.’  You just—well, you get to the turn, start turning the wheel . . . and from there on you just turn however much you need to in order to get it done.”

Nick was listening, so I kept going.

“Everything about driving is like that,” I continued.  “You do whatever you need to do for the circumstances.  You react to the situation, have a look at the results you’re getting, and then you either do more or less until you achieve what you want to achieve.”  I took a breath and tried to sum up:  “You just . . . you go do it.  You can’t really know in advance how much of this or that you’re gonna need until you’re into the situation.”

At that point, I believe, Nicholas started in with the questions.  I suspect I answered them, but I must’ve been on autopilot.  A thought suddenly preoccupied me.

In that moment, I’d stumbled on something else I wish I’d understood better when I was that tentative, contemplative boy:  That life itself is something you can’t plot out in advance; that you can’t wait until you have all the answers before you budge; that you have to go out and do it, make adjustments as you go, and keep adjusting until you get the results you want.  Ultimately, steering and braking and accelerating only have meaning within the context of moving.

I suppose that’ll be a talk I’ll have with my boys another day.

Lessons in Waiting

And while the thrills are fading
The joy is in the waiting
Somewhere in the grand design
It's good to be unsatisfied
It keeps the faith and hope a little more alive

                                - Downhere, My Last Amen

I’ve loved the look of the current-generation Camaro ever since it debuted as a show car in 2006.  One glance at its sculpted flanks and menacing visage and I thought, Dang, I gotta get me one of those.

In a heartbeat, I made the new Camaro my desktop background on my work computer, taped a poster of it to the back of my office door, and placed a Hot Wheels model of it on the shelf behind me.  I even joined an online Camaro forum.  These are the kinds of things I do when smitten.

Let’s get this part out of the way: I still do not own a new Camaro.  But the waiting is helping me understand that a dream deferred isn’t necessarily a dream denied, and I’ll tell you why.

I really, really do want a new Camaro.  Badly.  Not that I don’t still love my 2005 GTO.  I do.  It runs as strong as ever, even with 73,000 miles on it.  But that odometer—ugh.  I looked at it one day and suddenly thought, You know, this car is never going to be worth more as a trade-in than it is right now.  Thus motivated, I went inside, pulled up the Chevrolet Web site, and pieced together a car with the options I wanted: Synergy green, black stripes, manual tranny.  Then I did a search for the trade-in value of my car.  I looked at the numbers and my brain started clicking.

It was that close to being do-able.  Ugh.  I needed more information, so I shot off an e-mail to a local Chevrolet sales lady I know.  I heard back from her almost immediately.  What do you know?  They had that very car in stock.  A meant-to-be feeling welled within me.  Without knowing precisely when it happened, I transitioned from “what if?” to “I might do this!”

I arranged to stop at the dealer after work to see the car, then called my wife and made my case.  She sighed a lot, but ultimately said, “Go ahead; do what you want to do.  You’ve always wanted one.”  I could tell she wasn’t completely on board, but I thought I could get her to come around.

At the dealer, I found the Camaro displayed indoors, under bright lights, on a stand that tilted the car forward like a watch in a jeweler’s case.  Wow.  My sales lady got the keys and we sat in it.  More wow.  From someplace, a man appeared and asked for my GTO’s keys.  He was going to appraise it.  He came back and told me the trade-in value would be exactly what I had expected.  Then there were end-of-the-month discounts that further narrowed the gap between my trade and the Camaro’s price.  This was moving so fast!

I called my wife.  I called my mother.  Dang it!  No one would make up my mind for me: it was up to me to make the right decision.  I stood and stared at the car, trying to picture myself driving it home.

And there it was, in my mind’s eye, parked in my garage:  Parked in the garage of a house that needed paint, flooring, cabinets and counter tops; parked at a home whose backyard landscaping still wasn’t finished; parked under the same roof as outdated bathrooms badly in need of remodeling; parked where two boys have scads of activities that need to be paid for.

In the end, it was I who came around, not my wife.  I handed the keys back to the saleslady.  I thanked her for everything, but said the timing just wasn’t right.  She seemed a little stunned.  I don’t think she was accustomed to seeing people come so close and then . . . just say “no.”

Driving home, I was numb, bummed . . . but at peace.  The farther I got from the dealership, the more I knew I’d done the right thing.   As I turned into my neighborhood, I found Nicholas out on the sidewalk, waiting.  He’d heard his mother on the phone with me and learned I might be driving a new car home.  “Sorry, buddy,” I said after I parked.  “I didn’t get it.”

“That’s okay, Dad,” he said.

Just a few days after turning down the Camaro deal, I learned that Chevrolet will be coming out with a new, more powerful Camaro model for 2012—the ZL1.  Interesting.  Supercharged 550-horsepower engine and some other enhancements.  I have now made that car my computer desktop background.  Maybe that’s what I’ll save my pennies for.

Last weekend, while washing the GTO, Nick came outside and stood next to me, watching.  “Dad,” he pronounced, “I want you to get a new car, but I also really like this car.  I like how it looks.  It’s pretty.”

Nick’s right: I’m in a great situation exactly as I am.  That Camaro show car debuted five years ago, and I haven’t died of desire yet.  What’s another year or two?  The dream’s not denied.  Just deferred a little bit, and that’s okay.  It’ll be all the sweeter when it comes true.

Lessons in Wax

            I don’t know what possesses a person to make him enjoy waxing a car, but whatever that bug is, I have it.  Bad.

I can’t have inherited it; so far as I know, my father never waxed a car in his life.  Scarcely ever washed one, either.  Dad firmly believed that if a car’s windshield was clean and everything was in working order, that was enough.  Besides—he was more interested in the places the family could go and the things we could do in the car.  The car was a means to an end for dad, whereas to me it’s more of an end in itself.

So this obsession, I think, is one of those deals that skips a generation.  Case in point: Dad excelled at math and became an engineer, whereas I sucked at math and had the audacity to get a journalism degree.  Now my 13-year-old tells me he wants to be an automotive engineer, and my nine-year-old is surprisingly good with multiplication (especially his “twelves,” which I never could remember).  Neither of them likes to clean anything.

Ever.

The other day, I thought this was all about to change.  A succession of rainy weekends had left the GTO in a pitiable state, and I’d finally had enough.  I didn’t have time for the full wash and wax, but I knew I could squeeze in a quick whisk with a California Duster and a wipe-down with some Meguiar’s Ultimate Detailer.

My nine-year-old, Nick, was in the garage trailing me and yakking away (gabbiness did not skip a generation) when he suddenly declared that he wanted to do the same thing for my wife’s Chevy Traverse.

Wow!  An opportunity to instill some of my car-cleaning cleverness into my son!  A chance to teach him that car cleanliness is closer to godliness than pretty much all other kinds of cleanliness!

Excited, I got Nick his own micro fiber towel and his own spray bottle of Ultimate Detailer (you didn’t think I had just one, did you?), then showed him the process.  He listened, then went to town.  When he later saw me waxing my car’s hood and trunk lid, he wanted to do that, too.  I got him a sponge applicator and another micro fiber towel and showed him the whole “wax on, wax off” process.

After observing Nick a minute, I went back to work on the Goat.  What a great father-son moment, I thought.  We’re both in the garage waxing cars!  I lost sight of him while he was on the far side of my wife’s vehicle; preoccupied as I was with my own car, I was only vaguely aware of him orbiting the Traverse over and over.  Amazingly enough, my chatterbox child was relatively quiet as he assiduously applied his newfound skill.

            The silence ended when Nick declared, “Dad!  Look how pretty it is!  I wanna show Mom!”  I looked up from my post at the front of my car and was aghast.  One glance down the side of my wife’s vehicle—illuminated as it was by the bright sunlight streaming in through the open garage door—revealed an array of wax smears the like of which I had never seen.  Giant sweeping smears, little pinwheel smears, vertical, horizontal and diagonal smears—pretty much every smear in the smear book was represented.  I think there may have been triangles, too.  Perhaps an octagon.  The only saving grace: Nick’s too short to have smeared up the hood.

            Knowing Nick was proud of his work, I just stood for a moment.  Finally, I said, “Honey, I think you left a little . . . uh . . . wax.  Let me show you how to get it off.”  And I wiped down a panel the right way, showing Nick how the reflected sunlight told you whether you’d gotten it totally clean.

“Stop, Dad!” he implored, taking a step toward me.  “I see, I see!  I want to do it myself so I can show Mom!”  So I stopped.  Nick proceeded to take his towel and go over everything again, energy and enthusiasm undiminished.  He probably removed, oh, another 50 percent of the smears before he pronounced the job truly, totally done.  He leaned over and looked at the reflection, as I’d just taught him, and then ran inside and dragged my wife into the garage.  “Look, Mom!” he beamed.  “Isn’t it shiny?”

To her great credit, my wife simply smiled, thanked Nick and told him what a great job he’d done.  The rest of the weekend, she drove everywhere with all the smears intact.  She didn’t wipe a single one of them off.

As I put everything away, I started thinking.  When I wax a car, it’s kind of self-indulgent, really.  I do it because I enjoy it, and because I want my car to look good.   I’ll work tirelessly removing water spots only I can see, holding the car to a standard that matters only to me, spending way more time than is necessary . . . just to make myself happy.  And here were my wife and son, both content with far less.

Or far more?

Nick hadn’t waxed my wife’s car for the joy of waxing a car properly; he’d done it for the reckless, crazy joy of making someone else happy.  Was this yet another thing that had skipped a generation?  Curious: I had presumed to teach Nicholas something; instead, he taught me.