One of the blogs I read on occasion, called Life & Other Crises, is doing a series where every Monday the blog author writes about a First. As in, "first time drunk", "first kiss", "first fulfilled wish".
I wasn't particularly interested in delving into an account of any of those firsts. But the topic of Firsts twigged a memory from my teenage years of a very significant First of my own.
My First Car.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to my first car. A yellow AMC Gremlin. This is actually a picture of a Gremlin that I found online, but it looks identical to the one I had. And if that isn't the ugliest car on God's green earth, I don't know what is.
Some time after I turned 16, I got a part time job and, since we lived in the country, a 20 minute drive from town, I needed a car. My dad knew a guy who was a mechanic, and asked him if he knew of a good used car that I could buy. The guy showed Dad this baby and said he could have it for $700, which my dad thought was a pretty good deal.
Instead, by the time I found out about it, it was a done deal. I was the new owner of a mechanically sound, albeit hideously ugly, yellow Gremlin, and I owed the mechanic $700.
A few days after my momentous purchase, I was invited to a party in town. I arrived in my yellow Gremlin, which none of my friends had seen. I quietly parked on the street and went inside to join the party. A short while later, my best friend happened to look out the window and saw the Gremlin on the street and declared, "who on earth is driving that ugly yellow car?"
It didn't help any that she had just received a brand new Ford Escort from her parents for her 16th birthday.
I console myself with the belief that driving that ugly car was a character building experience. You know, the old maxim, "what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger." Yup, that's me.
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