I got my first car, a Pontiac Sunbird, in the summer of 1998. I drove it my senior year of high school, and when I went to college, my brother drove it. Then my mom drove it. For the last few years, though, it'd been kicking around my parents' driveway, not driving much at all.
Last fall I decided Chris and I could use a back-up car, so we brought it down to Providence to be our spare. But we didn't use it much, and it developed a squeak, and there was some question about whether it would pass inspection when the sticker ran out. So I decided to give it back to my parents, and since no one needed it anymore, they'd donate it to charity.
I drove it back home on Sunday night to drop it off, to say goodbye. It was a lot sadder than I expected. Now, in my apartment lot, the empty space glares.
Every boy loves his first car. But I feel especially attached to my first car, I think, because of its unique smell, a smell I've never smelled in any other car. The closest I can come to describing it is to say that it smelled of warm, dusty cloth. I don't know how it got to be so pronounced. In all the years I owned the car, that smell never changed or faded. It even outlasted the air freshener Chris added last winter. I was afraid it would be overpowered by mango-orange, but no.
Because our sense of smell is so closely tied to memory, every time I got in that car was like every other time I got into it; a sniff of a memory bouquet. Driving to the train station last week made me think of driving to high school almost ten years ago. Did every time.
I feel sentimental about the loss because that car was my only link to high school. Not that those were good days (there are reasons why a car remains my only link), but they had their good moments, and most of the latter were spent in that car -- driving to movies, stopping at Wendy's late at night for square burgers with pals. Burgers that in my memory smell like warm, dusty cloth.
Sight can remind you; sound can jog your mind, but smell can make you remember and chuckle to yourself; it can make you cry. Smell can also make you ache.
That warm, dusty-cloth smell, in its bouquet, held an ache to the last: ah, the ache of first love. Driving the car home to my parents' the other day, I happened to glance in the rearview and spotted a gray Blazer behind me, and I wondered, without thinking, whether it was a boy I went to high school with -- the one I looked for and hoped to see back when I drove the Sunbird. Always him (hopefully!) in the rearview back then. Sometimes even him in the passenger seat. Like square burgers, like movies, like Pine Street and Gold Star Boulevard, he smells that same warm, dusty-cloth smell.
Hm.
I almost hoped the car would break down on the last drive to Leicester -- break down severely. I almost hoped the engine would seize, or the whole undercarriage would fall,
kerplunk, onto the pavement when I rolled up outside my parents' house. Just so I could be the last one to drive it, and so I'd know beyond doubt that its days were over. But the car drove fine, and smooth, and its easy speed belied its years and wear-n-tear. It will probably drive for another 50,000 miles that are not my miles. And the warm, dusty-cloth smell, to the next owner, will mean nothing.
