Like a lot of American males, I got my first car when I was 16. To call it a rite of passage would be to completely underestimate the significance of that moment in my life. Of course, in retrospect, I can admit that my first car was a veritable piece o' crap. My father bought a Robin's Egg Blue 1968 Ford Fairlane for $50, put $2.97 worth of parts into it, and then sold it to me for $53. Clearly, Dad wasn't trying to pad my college fund....
I'll spare y'all the gory details, but the car didn't even last a year. It spent more time in extremis than it did on the road. Still, it was MINE, and the freedom that it represented was priceless. I will never, ever forget the feeling of being able to drive my girlfriend to Minneapolis, two hours to the south. Of course, the car died, and we had to take the bus back home with my high school's track team. That, thankfully, is another, much more embarrassing story best left for another time.
Now I am reliving my experiences and memories through Eric. He turned 16 in July, and bought his new car, an early-80s Toyota Celica, soon thereafter. Like my car, his has significant issues, much as you'd expect for a 20+ year-old vehicle. Yesterday, his car died in a not-so-great neighborhood in Pasadena. I went with Eric to try and figure out if we could breathe enough life into it to get it home. Of course, not being an auto mechanic, I couldn't offer much more than moral support. The end result is that Eric's car is still in the same spot.
As we drove home in my truck, I could see the same disappointment in Eric that I had to deal with so many years ago. What made it worse is that there isn't anything I could do to help. Some rites of passages are tougher than others, I guess. I feel for him, but the best I can do is to hope that someday he'll be able to look back at this time and laugh. It wasn't so funny for me when I was 16, either. Almost 30 years and a great deal of perspective later, it does seem rather comical. I hope the same for Eric- not that is going to help him much at the moment.
