posted 2007/04/28 at 17:14
My father's always been a classic car nut. Back when he was going to Michigan State, he actually put himself through school by buying old cars that were having problems, fixing them, and then reselling them. Of course, this was long ago, back when you could actually take a car apart with common tools and fix things, something which my father constantly complains about any time one of our minivans breaks down. Still, to this day whenever we pass a classic car out on the road, my father is able to identify the make, model, and year with such accuracy that it's kind of astonishing. Not that I don't have my own hobbies and obsessions and stuff where I can identify similar things that most people wouldn't even think to notice, but somehow my father's ability to identify classic cars never fails to amaze me.
Being that we've never been a tremendously rich family, we've never really owned that many classic cars, and those that we've had we've usually sold later for other purposes. The only one we really held onto for any length of time was a 1947 V-8 Ford, which we'd had for as long as I can remember, probably before I was even born. It was coloured this weird ruddy peach -- nearly flesh-tone, actually -- and it had more than its fair share of problems (mainly no way to defog the inside without rolling the windows down, a huge pain in the winter), but back when I was a kid my father took me out on drives in it all the time, and even though I've never particularly been that interested in cars, it was still nice to go out driving in it.
After my father started his own business, though, the Ford just sat in the garage collecting dust. It wasn't that my father didn't have time to go out driving in it, but he just seemed to lose interest. I also think he was kind of disappointed that neither of his kids wound up taking an interest in classic cars. After the house fire we actually had to keep the Ford in a garage ten minutes away, and even though no one said anything about it, we all kept wondering what father was going to do with the Ford. Well, this past week my father finally sold the Ford, and in what I hope is not an ominous foreshadowing, he sold it to the owner of the big local funeral home here in Toledo.
Even though I probably haven't even been inside the Ford in over fifteen years now, and I never even laid eyes on it after the fire, I still feel a strange sense of loss now that the Ford's gone. I guess that if nothing else, it's forcing me to think about me and my packrat mentality, and all of the strange things I hold on to. Some of them I can justify as investments -- particularly my old video games -- but I can't help but wonder what's going to happen to all of this stuff when I die. Even if I take a partner some day, I really don't want kids, so I have to wonder what would happen to all of my stuff. Maybe it's time for me to get serious about writing up a will here.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon