Cars mean nothing to some people, but I’m not one of this group. My very first car was a Fiat Spyder that had been in a fairly significant accident. After it had been rebuilt by some less-than-professionals, my mother bought it and presented the car to me as a gift on my graduation from high school. I’m sure she did this with the best of intentions, but that car gave me nightmares. I ended up pushing it as much as I drove it.
I’ve always had a thing for small, fast, agile cars. I’m very specific in my tastes and the car of my dreams is all three. Small. Fast. Agile. For many years after the Fiat(shudder) , my circumstances required me to drive boring vehicles. When my husband and I had decided to have children, we ended up purchasing such a car–white, four-door and soul-killing. I cried as we drove to pick it up and my poor husband assured me that we didn’t have to go through with the purchase. But at that time, buying that car was the best decision.
For years, I submerged my desire for a fun car…until one day I found a significant balance on a credit card that hadn’t been there before. When I called my Lovey about this, he was at work and, after a pause, he said we’d talk about it when he got home. He later told me that we’d been offered a really, really low percentage rate card (back when credit was more available). Thinking he’d surprise me, he’d taken a cash advance on this card, put it in a higher-earning interest account and…he thought it was time to buy the car I’d longed for so long.
I bought my Honda S2000 on Ebay several months later. If you don’t know the car, look at the photo at the top right side of my Home page. It was a lovely, lovely gift of his heart–he found a way to get me what I’d long dreamed of. I put nearly 100,000 miles on that car and I’ve lost track of the number of times I came inside from parking it in the garage, telling my husband that I loved that car. I mean loved.
I only sold it when after much-discussion with my ever-loving spouse, he convinced me that a.) cars need repairs after a certain number of miles and b.) repairs on a high-performance car such as the S2000 weren’t cheap. Since replacing the top, which already had several small holes, would cost at least $5,000, I knew it was time to say goodbye.
Even though I now drive a really beautiful, even faster Z4, I still feel wistful when I pass an S2000. Lovey teases me about that.