Your First Car

I remember my first car. It was an old four-door silver Honda Civic, which marked the signing of my first employment contract as a teacher in a district where I ended up staying for 30 years. It was scary and I felt all grown up going to sign the paperwork. That car would carry me on a long commute every day from East Vancouver to the suburbs.

That car drove me to San Francisco with my then fiancé. We almost had an accident on the way down as traffic came to a grinding halt on the I-5 and I nearly rear-ended the driver in front of me. I can still feel my adrenaline pumping when I recall slamming on the breaks and skidding. We stayed at his friend’s lavish apartment at the corner of Haight-Ashbury, the most famous corner of the flower power era. We ate pan-fried oysters, danced in several nightclubs, and drank a pitcher of sangria at a Mexican restaurant where they forgot to charge us for it.

A year later, that car also carried my baby girl. I was terrified the first time I put her into the car seat. She seemed so vulnerable in this hunk of metal speeding down the highway. It felt like all the other cars were menacingly aiming at us.

Then we got a yellow lab and the car always smelled like wet dog because Seymour was constantly running into our local lake. The seats were draped with old towels. It was worth it though because the dog made my daughter laugh and there is nothing better than the sound of your child laughing.

I remember feeling really sad when I traded the car in for a newer model a few years later. It brought up the memory of me crying at age five when my dad got rid of our old pale blue Volkswagen bug. You form a strange attachment, almost as if it were an old friend.

Do you recall your own first car? Please subscribe and share a personal memory below.