When my dad bought his first brand-new car he did it without warning. One day in 1992 he just came home with a shining blue minivan that smelled like a factory in Mexico.

This was the largest car my sister and I had ever seen (I was 10, she was 14). Like scientists observing an unusually intelligent primate, we stood back, stroking our chins, assessing our new rolling domain.

Our previous car had been a red 1979 Chevrolet Monza, which we called simply “El Monza”. Still today if you say “El Monza” around my family everyone will know what you’re talking about. It was a small two-door sports car that was first owned by commercial-airline pilot. I don’t know how we knew that, it was just always self-evident, the kind of thing you could tell just by looking at it. “Oh, look at that small red car that was once owned by a jumbo-jet pilot.”

In 1979, El Monza was probably a good car for cruising around with stewardesses. It had a long, sloping hatch-back, so if you put the seats down you could lie in the back with the trunk open, watching the starts. I did this once with my dad on camping trip to Red Wing, so I can’t imagine why the pilot wouldn’t have done it with his buxom blondes.

In 1986, when my parents bought the car at a thrift-store car-auction, the hatchback trunk had acquired a more practical purpose. By then, the driver’s side door had succumbed to a mysterious malfunction, and that left only two other entrances: the passenger side door and the trunk. My preference was for going in via the trunk, when at all possible. I liked the crawl across the ragged black carpeting and the awkward flip into the back seats.

The minivan, by comparison, with its three working doors (four counting the trunk), was an explosion in car-quality improvements. It had a stereo (El Monza had a kick-ass eight-track deck, which kicked the asses of a few absurdly bad Neil Diamond tapes by ruining them…more so). It also had air conditioning, which as far as I know didn’t exist before 1992. And cup holders (how-did-they-get-through-the-70s-without-them).

These things, combined with the charming/annoying crappiness of El Monza, meant that for me, the van was the greatest car ever made. In reality, it was as stripped-down as it could possibly get; no tape deck (remember, it was 1992, CDs still took up whole rooms in the Pentagon), no power anything, no reclining seats. It was a vacant shell of a car, no frills, no comforts, nothing.

And yet, I loved it. I proclaimed myself a Dodge loyalist from that moment forth; I swore never to buy a car of any other make. My sister and I dreamed of all the things we could do with the expansive area behind the back seats. Forts! Beds! TVs!

A child’s imagination is so fertile, it doesn’t take much to get it fired up. A new car, even one that I now recognize as being utterly mediocre, was more than enough.

But my excitement was not unrestrained. I remember driving by other, less fortunate families in their beat-up Corsicas and LeBarons and thinking, “It’s not right that our family should have such a nice car while those people have nothing. It’s just not right.” This is the same kind of thought some people have when they see a starving African child on TV during the course of a steak dinner. Expect a stripped-down 1992 Dodge Caravan, even brand new, is no steak dinner. And only a person who’d never before been in a new car could ever think that there was something excessive about it.

Since then my family has gone through a sort of new-car mania. My mom got a new Honda Civic and a new Subaru Outback in the space of five years. My dad just replaced the old van after months of having the engine stall at critical moments (like merging on the highway). My promise of loyalty (long-ago abandoned) lives on in him: he bought a brand-new 2003 Dodge Caravan. But nothing matches the feeling of that first new car.

Me, I’m still milking the family’s second-ever new car, a 1994 Toyota Tercel (El Turdcel) that has no AC, no odometer, and good old-fashioned hand-cranked windows. Best of all, it has a completely malfunctioning driver’s side door.

Just give me a friendly stewardess, a few Neil Diamond tapes, and the open road.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 13th, 2004 at 6:28 am and is filed under Transportation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.