“Hey, it still runs.”
I have little interest in cars, except if we’re talking Volkswagen Beetles, Buses or Squarebacks. They bring memories of my youth in Los Angeles. My dad had a beige Squareback and my sister a white Beetle. I have always wanted a VW bus, with the idea of taking long road trips up the California coast to surf remote spots. I can still remember the smell of the hot vinyl in the sun in my dad’s Squareback.
I can also remember watching the road go by through the floorboards. The Squareback had a hole in the floor behind the front passenger’s seat. If you dropped something, bye bye. It was gone. If it rained, you got splashed.
Today I have a grey Hyundai Elantra, a modern and less redolent version of the Squareback, really. It is 10 years old and runs well. And it’s intact for the most part, except that five years ago I ran over a tree stump. A friend told me to get it fixed or it’d rust. I never did.
I think that maybe my three kids will one day have a car with a hole in its floor.
