Autolalia

My friend Diana paid a lovely automotive homage to her father, Shorty Paulina in her blog yesterday. A Dearborn native, Diana captured how the cars we owned defined us, a container for our memories of childhood and beyond.

After the 1953 Ford, my Dad got adventurous and bought an English Ford Anglia. It was black with a red interior and a four speed transmission. It was not fast or safe, with a metal dashboard and bucket seats which tipped forward on hinges at the front, and with no latch to hold them down. My mother, to this day, puts her hands across the other front seat passenger's chest at any hard stop.

No one else had a car like this, and we kept it from 1963 until 1971. People would ask Dad if it was a sports car and he would reply that it was "a poor man's sports car." I had a theory that normal families drove Chevy's and Buicks (particularly Buicks). Once we drove it from southern Ohio to Kansas in the heat of summer (no air conditioning in this baby) with my grandmother and a tranquilized cat in the back seat. We probably should have shared the tranquilizers with Grandmother as well. I can still feel the sweat and cat hair.

I shared my Buick theory of normalcy with a client who had suffered horrific abuse as a child and he paled and shook his head. "My family always drove Buicks," he said. Thus perished another of my theories of order in the universe.