The Cars that Have Owned Me

I started my latest project with a vague idea of reminiscing about the cars in my life after reading a Christian Science Monitor article on the cost of driving various cars. The article got me wondering why I bought particular cars when I did.

Before I started pushing images around in my head, I thought I bought my ’65 Mustang in reaction to having to drive a ’50 Studebaker throughout college. If advertising was to be believed, I instantly went from “loser” to “cool.” And it wasn’t just advertisers who seemed to believe that, either. Though I like to think I’m less subject to social pressure now than when I was younger, I’m sure it still plays a part in everything I buy. I doubt I’ll ever totally escape its influence and even if I want to escape it entirely.

It’s not all about status, though. I’ve also always enjoyed quality machines, whether computers, power tools or cars. The Apple G5 I’m writing on is a clear indication I haven’t shaken that tendency, nor do I want to. I still think the Mustang was a great buy for its time. Though it didn’t compare to the ’65 Corvette, it was more sports car for the money than I could buy anywhere else. It was my favorite car until I bought a Honda CRX, which was an even sportier car for less money and got better mileage, to boot.

While working on my photo collage, though, I realized that the ’65 Mustang holds some complex, powerful memories for me, memories I didn’t completely realize were there. Looking back, I’m not sure whether those feelings influenced me in buying the car or whether they’re simply the result of experiences I had while I owned it.

I ordered the Mustang while training at Fort Knox and it was waiting for me when I returned Kentucky. I drove it to my first Army post, Fort Irwin, in the Mohave Desert less than a week later. It was my faithful companion for the eighteen months I was stationed there, a pleasant escape from the inescapable boredom of being stationed hundreds of miles away from civilization and from single girls. It instantly, or at least at speeds up to a hundred miles an hour, whisked me away to Vegas, Los Angeles, and, even, when truly desperate, Bakersfield. It was, quite simply, a joy to drive on the open highway, especially with the windows down and the radio playing wide open.

Apparently my memories of that Mustang are forever linked to my years in the Army, just as my memories of those years seem somehow tied to my childhood love of John Wayne movies, particularly She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. A movie that, in turn, probably influenced my choice of the Armor branch. While everyone in R.O.T.C. thought that as an English major I would choose the Adjutant General Branch, it never crossed my mind to choose anything but Armor. The question, of course, is whether those same unconscious feelings influenced my buying a mustang, particularly a yellow Mustang. Strangely enough, I’m no longer particularly fond of John Wayne movies, and I’ve never considered buying a yellow car since that time.

No wonder advertisers are able to manipulate us into buying things we neither need nor want when we don’t understand why we want them ourselves. Why do we turn to books written by others before examining the things we own and the things that own us to discover who we are and who we want to be?

The Price of College

As a 30-year high school teacher I now realize how important a teenager’s first car is. It’s little wonder, then, that I was deeply disappointed in my first car, a 1950 Studebaker.

I bought the car from a little old lady across the street who kept the car in the garage most of the time, preferring to walk rather than drive her Studebaker to nearby stores, and who would blame her. Despite being nearly ten years old, the car had less than 40,000 miles on it, and, given the opportunity it probably could have lasted another ten years.

I hated it the moment I saw it. But I was still living at home and working for my dad, so his opinion weighed heavily, very heavily, on my decision to buy it to get to college. He thought it was a very practical car. So did I. A sure strike against it. The front seat had sunken so I needed to put blankets under the seat covers so I could see out the windshield, and at 6 foot I wasn’t’
particularly short. Later I discovered that the car had spent so much time in the garage that the rubber gasket holding the windshield in place had dried out, and water poured in when I drove down the freeway in the rain, an all-too-common event in Seattle.

I suppose I should have been grateful to own a car at all. After all, I drove around West Seattle picking up fellow students who couldn’t afford a car. Without a car it was a long, arduous trek to the U.

I wasn’t. Grateful. The car had “LOSER,” or, worse yet, “NERD,” written all over it. Despite Studebaker’s claims it was “the car of the future,” it was really the car with no future, and it didn’t take a genius to figure that out. Perhaps, in a way it really was the perfect car for a college student, one who had sacrificed the now for a future that never quite turned out the way he hoped it would.

Luckily my high school girl friend and I had parted ways at the end of my senior year because it would have been embarassing to pick her up in that car after years of picking her up in my dad’s sporty car. I know I wouldn’t have taken her to high school football games and shown up in front of old friends.

I still blame that Studebaker for the fact that I dated very little the first two years of college, though, in truth, working 30 to 40 hours a week while attending college full time and being naturally shy might have had as much to do with that as the car. Still, when I was finally able to afford a better car my senior year I could hardly work enough hours to pay for all my dates.

Have These People No Shame?

I miss my walking/hiking partner for several reasons, not least is that if I were walking with him three or four times a week I wouldn’t feel compelled to write about the tragic battle over prolonging Terri Schiavo’s life when I’d rather continue playing with Katrin Eismann’s Photoshop: Masking and Compositing. If we were still walking, I would have gotten this out of my system days ago.

Unfortunately, the attempts by conservative politicians to intervene in this case to gain political points by pushing their “culture of life” agenda infuriates me, leaving little choice but to drop my Wacom pen and speak out against such hypocrisy.

I find it odd that politicians trying to cut Medicaid funding choose to intervene in this case. Who has paid to maintain Terri on life support the last fifteen years? Judging from the costs of my recent five day stay in the hospital, I’d doubt that either Terri’s parents or her husband has been able to pay those costs. I doubt an insurance company would bear those costs. Even less expensive nursing homes are prohibitively expensive. That leaves me to suspect that it is Medicaid, as in so most prolonged cases, that has paid those enormous costs. Yet these same congressman who seem more than willing to see the elderly turned out of nursing homes into the streets because of high costs are eager to pay the cost of maintaining life support for a woman who has been in a persistent vegetative state” for the past 15 years?

I can certainly sympathize with Terri’s parents desire to see their daughter kept alive no matter what the circumstances. That’s how parents are supposed to feel, isn’t it? On the other hand, when my mother who was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease broke her shoulder and contracted pneumonia, I was the one who said that we didn’t want any extraordinary steps taken to extend her life. Thankfully, my decision was made easier by the fact that my mother, whose grandmother had also had Alzheimer’s, had repeatedly stated she would not want to live under those conditions. And, it didn’t hurt that I strongly believe I would not want to be kept alive under such conditions either.

How can those very people who claim to want to see “God’s Will” done find it unacceptable to remove a feeding tube from someone who has been in a vegetative state for fifteen years. Keeping someone alive under such conditions seems to me like a denial of God’s supremacy, an unwillingness to accept God’s final call. If God intended for her to live, wouldn’t He keep her alive after doctors withdrew her feeding tube?

How will politicians decide how long to keep Terri Schiavo alive? Until her parents die? Until a cure is found? Until her natural life span would have run out? Are we willing to say that ALL such victims should be kept on life support equally long, no matter what the costs to society?

Do we really want politicians stepping in and making these kind of personal decisions for us? Shouldn’t those closest to the victims make such decisions? Are politicians ready to rewrite laws so that parents rather than husbands or wives decide how patients are treated?

It seems evident to me that doctors and those legally designated to make such decisions, “loved ones,” should be left to make them according to their own conscience unless there are obvious reasons the government must step in to protect innocent victims. However, Terri’s case has been through the courts so many times in the last 15 years that it seems unimaginable that any such conditions could exist.

Added: Here’s an updated perspective on this issue.
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