Cars and Trucks I Have Loved

     I have bought a lot of cars in my life, some good, some bad. My first car was a 55 Studebaker, which I loved, and it was a fantastic car as every Studebaker I ever knew of in my life. My second car was a 57 Mercury which was a gorgeous car, but a beautiful piece of crap when it was just 6 years old. My third car was a 51 Henry J Kaiser. Joyce thought it looked like a baby whale, but I loved it despite its limitations, which were many. There were many between my next love in cars, but my 67 Volkswagen beetle was perhaps my favorite of all. I bought it in 80, the odometer said 74,000 miles, but the first time I tinkered with it I saw an oil change sticker under the hood that said 144,000 miles on it. We still ran it for years and our daughter Annie ran it even longer. I might still have it today, but Joyce was driving it one day and it was rear-ended by a truck. We had it fixed, but with the rear engine, it was never the same.

     I have just two trucks I have loved, first a 56 Ford F-100 with the then called Thunderbird V-8 and dual exhausts. It sounded great and ran equally well. It was not mine, but that did not matter. The second was a 65 Chevy I bought for a paltry $500 in San Diego and sold it a year later for the same money. The Chevy was plain with a straight 6 and a column shift which to me has always been the ultimate configuration for a pickup. My Nissan that I had for 28 years was a good, maybe a great truck, but I never loved it.

     I suppose there is something inside a person that decides the difference between something dependable and functional and something a man loves.