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.