Prompt #
27 - Cars
We lived on a farm so we always had to have our own transportation. My parents drove home to Manitoba from BC on their honeymoon in an old model-T type car which I have only seen in photos. In winter we still used horses as the road into the house was not built until the year I started school. So I came home from the nursing home/hospital where I was born in Rivers, MB, in December, in a horse-drawn wagon across fields drifted with snow. Very romantic, but I don't remember anything except the white sparkle of sunshine on snow. I remember Dad had a really old grain truck with a long stick shift in front of the bench seat and holes in the floorboards where you could watch the road go by underneath. The first family car I remember was the new white 1952 Pontiac, licence number Manitoba 1P 719. My favourite was the new 1957 Pontiac because it was turquoise and white.
Although I knew how to drive the tractor to pull the stoneboat or the hayrack, my mother taught me how to drive the car. She said she never had any gray hair before then. I failed my first test so then I took some lessons from an instructor in Brandon who seemed to give his directions by hand movements along my thigh. I didn't go back. I remembered this later when one of my students went for her driver test and she wrote the big letters R and L on her jeans so she could remember which was Right and which was Left on her test. When the instructor asked her what the letters meant, she said they were her boyfriend's initials.
I bought my first car the second year I was teaching, when I just had my learner's licence. I had to get permission to leave school, walk down to where the testing was done, where I had left my car earlier that morning, and take the test with the sixteen-year-old kids. Thank goodness, I passed, as when I got back, all the kids in class sang to me “Happy birthday, Sweet Sixteen.” I bought that car, a blue Pontiac Ventura, from my dad's dealer friend, and when I went to trade it in, he said he wouldn't have it back in his district. It had all that newfangled pollution prevention equipment on it and because of that, it got about four miles to the gallon. (See, that was so long ago, it was before metric conversion.)
In a car I look for value, environmental friendliness, and function, never for status or for national pride. I still like to think that it should have features which will allow me to sleep in it if necessary (camping, forest fires, homelessness.) After that first car, I switched to Toyota. I kept my first Corolla, gold, more than ten years, so long that the driver-side floorboard wore out and the gas pedal dropped off. I took it to my brother's mechanic to fix. He called it “my Flintstone car,” you know, the ones they wear, with their feet pedalling out the bottom. After my second, blue, Toyota died a natural death, I switched to Hyundai. I had my black Hyundai for seventeen years. Can't complain. Since then I just buy old cars, good enough to get me around town, and I take the bus if I have to go into the city, or bus and taxi to get to the airport. My next move will be to some place I can live without owning a car. Haven't figured out where that will be yet. Because I love my house and where I live right now. I've said this before. I am so lucky.
We lived on a farm so we always had to have our own transportation. My parents drove home to Manitoba from BC on their honeymoon in an old model-T type car which I have only seen in photos. In winter we still used horses as the road into the house was not built until the year I started school. So I came home from the nursing home/hospital where I was born in Rivers, MB, in December, in a horse-drawn wagon across fields drifted with snow. Very romantic, but I don't remember anything except the white sparkle of sunshine on snow. I remember Dad had a really old grain truck with a long stick shift in front of the bench seat and holes in the floorboards where you could watch the road go by underneath. The first family car I remember was the new white 1952 Pontiac, licence number Manitoba 1P 719. My favourite was the new 1957 Pontiac because it was turquoise and white.
Although I knew how to drive the tractor to pull the stoneboat or the hayrack, my mother taught me how to drive the car. She said she never had any gray hair before then. I failed my first test so then I took some lessons from an instructor in Brandon who seemed to give his directions by hand movements along my thigh. I didn't go back. I remembered this later when one of my students went for her driver test and she wrote the big letters R and L on her jeans so she could remember which was Right and which was Left on her test. When the instructor asked her what the letters meant, she said they were her boyfriend's initials.
I bought my first car the second year I was teaching, when I just had my learner's licence. I had to get permission to leave school, walk down to where the testing was done, where I had left my car earlier that morning, and take the test with the sixteen-year-old kids. Thank goodness, I passed, as when I got back, all the kids in class sang to me “Happy birthday, Sweet Sixteen.” I bought that car, a blue Pontiac Ventura, from my dad's dealer friend, and when I went to trade it in, he said he wouldn't have it back in his district. It had all that newfangled pollution prevention equipment on it and because of that, it got about four miles to the gallon. (See, that was so long ago, it was before metric conversion.)
In a car I look for value, environmental friendliness, and function, never for status or for national pride. I still like to think that it should have features which will allow me to sleep in it if necessary (camping, forest fires, homelessness.) After that first car, I switched to Toyota. I kept my first Corolla, gold, more than ten years, so long that the driver-side floorboard wore out and the gas pedal dropped off. I took it to my brother's mechanic to fix. He called it “my Flintstone car,” you know, the ones they wear, with their feet pedalling out the bottom. After my second, blue, Toyota died a natural death, I switched to Hyundai. I had my black Hyundai for seventeen years. Can't complain. Since then I just buy old cars, good enough to get me around town, and I take the bus if I have to go into the city, or bus and taxi to get to the airport. My next move will be to some place I can live without owning a car. Haven't figured out where that will be yet. Because I love my house and where I live right now. I've said this before. I am so lucky.
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