BAY ST. LOUIS — There must be something satisfying about the care and feeding of a car. I don’t know a Maverick from a manifold, but I can tell when people are happy. Car people are happy people.
It’s as if mortgage payments, demanding bosses, estranged spouses and tropical storms do not exist when thousands gather from all over the country for the 19th annual Cruisin’ The Coast in South Mississippi. The participants all become kids again. They gun their engines. They spray gravel. They wave and take selfies with old roadsters and big smiles.
As they roll up and down the white-skirted Mississippi Sound, the cars seem to run on pure passion. Nobody even seems to mind the price of gasoline. This hobby is not about sitting still.
The amazing thing, in a week of watching, is that I’ve seen only one old car disabled on the side of the road. It was one of my favorites, too, a white ’57 Thunderbird. And I bet the glitch was momentary.
The greatest car show in the nation sends us spectators cruising down Memory Lane, of course. I keep thinking of cars that mattered in my life.
There was my grandfather’s 1949 Chevrolet in basic black. I learned to drive in that car, when I was about 9 or 10. The rural route in South Georgia was so empty that Pop could pull stunts like that without endangering anyone’s life but his own.
That old car had personality. Pop once hauled a lassoed alligator from his fish pond to the creek in its trunk. I wasn’t along for that ride, but my cousins swore you could hear the gator thrashing about, sending chills up and down their young spines.
I was there the night somebody tried to steal the car from its nest in the car shed right next to the house. Nothing like that had ever happened in his Camelot of corn fields and unlocked doors.
The thief shut the car door — it had considerable heft — and Pop heard. He rushed out, waving his snake gun. The intruder vanished, leaving draped across the grass the striped blanket an uncle had brought Pop from Mexico. That was before people would shoot you for your tennis shoes.
I also loved the old Volkswagen Bug my father bought for me from a neighbor for $400 so I’d have something to drive to my first newspaper job. It had to rest every 100 miles, and the passenger seat reared back every so often, but otherwise it was the perfect car.
After I married a man with a brand-new Ford Pinto, we sold the VW Bug for about what it had cost my father. You keep trading up in the car world, or at least that’s the theory.
There would be a couple of sports car duds on my automotive lifeline, including a beautiful MGB convertible that rarely ran, before I settled into Fords, a long string of workhorses that got me where I was going. I would have loved a Jaguar, but only if a friend in a Ford could ride right behind.
I now drive a red, high-mileage Mini Cooper, mostly because it reminds me of France and has a great sound system. I’ve had it five years and never once considered trading. Wherever I go, folks ask about the gas mileage, and I briefly feel smug and almost hybrid-superior. I can park anywhere.
Then I punch in a CD and enjoy the real draw.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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