Antique & Classic Cars Blog

A woman called me a few days ago asking for an interview. I wasn’t sure why someone would want to interview me, but she hadn’t said “Detective” before her name, so it sounded OK. Turns out she was doing a piece on car-book authors for a regional publication called, “What’s Playing.”

One of her questions was, “When did you first become interested in cars?” To a non-car nut, that may seem like a reasonable–even essential–question. But car nuts will tell you that they’ve always been interested in cars. It’s like asking someone from Latvia, “how long have you been Latvian?”

When my brother and I cleaned out the family home several years ago, one of the old photos to emerge shows a tow-headed two-year old astride a red plastic Triumph TR3. I am grinning, of course. The photograph predates my memory, yet I am a car nut then as now.

I wonder how many readers of these pages can remember some moment that triggered a fascination with cars…. My guess is almost none.

Car fascination is akin to appreciating a mountain range or a roaring waterfall or a soaring eagle, even if it’s the first time you’ve seen one. You don’t decide to appreciate it; you appreciate it because it appeals to your sense of wonder or freedom or power or speed.

It was no conscious decision to emerge from the primordial muck any more than it was to invent the wheel. The former led to becoming a creature with arms and legs. The latter set the stage for the car, so we could use our limbs to steer and brake and shift.

Isn’t the universe great?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Car parts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.