“If you keep it Susan, drive it.”
In the beginning it was his car. The second of two old Porsches that were his pride and joy. The first one was a white 1967 912 with a bit of rust that he acquired a year out of undergraduate school. We had known each other for a few years at that point, having met at a weekend student convention in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Me? A naïve Staten Islander still living home with her parents and commuting to college in Brooklyn, who had traveled more than 200 miles from home exactly once before that Nebraska weekend.
Him? An intense, funny, intellectual Jewish boy from New England who could build and fix anything and who was living on the thinnest of shoestrings. Almost from the time we met, he had been searching for an older, affordable Porsche, a car that he could tinker with and fix himself.
The day he bought the 912 there was excitement in his voice that I had never heard. I marveled at his utter joy as I sat on my bed, with the landline cord stretched the distance across my bedroom, “I have the car! It’s mine! It’s really mine!” And so it began.
He changed the oil, made what repairs he could, and despaired over the cost of those he couldn’t. The 912 was sold in 1991 when we were living in Alabama, married by then, and still scrapping by and paying off our student loans. The new pride and joy was a 1970 911T in glorious Prince Albert Blue, purchased from the original owner in Birmingham for $7,000, a price that made us both gasp. I sold my car, he sold the 912 and his motorcycle, and we sucked it up and signed the note for the balance. I say “we” but it was most definitely his car. Not that he didn’t share it…but the 911 and Ross were one and I was the extra in that relationship and we had a bit of a joke that both the 912 and the 911 were jealous of me. The cars only broke down when I drove them…a fuel pump failure one time, a broken throttle link another, a security system lock out after I stalled on the highway on my way to a job interview.
We came close to selling the 911 once (and we have always called it the “blue car” by the way…never the Porsche or the 911). We were back in Boston with a three-year-old and me in graduate school and the car seemed a ridiculously indulgent luxury we couldn’t afford. After much deliberation, an ad was placed and a willing buyer found. And the night before we were going to hand it over, I lay awake in bed, unsettled. “How can we do this? There will never be a replacement for this car. He has so much work in this, so much of himself.” In the morning my decision was made and it didn’t take much to convince a relieved husband that the balance between the joy that car brought and the infusion of cash just wasn’t…well, it just wasn’t a balance. So the car stayed. And if it was getting a bit worn around the edges, it was still a glorious car in June of 1999 as we sat at our dining room table late one evening. I was fresh out of graduate school in a new job and our two sons were in bed.
“If you keep it Susan, drive it.”
He died of a glioblastoma brain tumor two weeks later, 17 months after his initial diagnosis of terminal cancer. And I kept the car. An insane decision made in grief and in love. Made in a desperate attempt to hold on to as much of him as possible. To hold on to the quirky and the scrappy and the roll-his-sleeves-up and fix it outlook on life that was who he was. I had a five-year-old and a five-month-old, no nearby family, two jobs, a fixer-upper in disarray, and was exhausted. All the time. Getting the blue car through a passed inspection that summer took three days in 100-degree weather with my infant son in a car seat in the back–visiting four different dealers and auto shops to get the parts needed and work done. I almost heard him laughing at me – me, the one with no patience. Almost.
I say I “kept” the car but it felt less like ownership than guardianship—taking care and holding it in trust for my two sons one day. As guardian, I powered through the expensive inconvenience, the impracticality of it all: driving it to storage in the winters, waiting for parts too long on back order, dealing with the barely avoided Fred Flintstone moment when I found only rust and no metal under the gas pedal.
Through all of this I did drive it. In summer, when I had a few hours on a weekend, commuting one fall to teach twice a week, and even taking it to the track for driver’s ed. But it wasn’t my car. As much as I loved it, I wouldn’t have chosen it and it wasn’t my dream car when we bought it back in 1991. I didn’t have a dream car then except perhaps a car, any car, that had air conditioning to get us through the hot sticky Alabama summers. And while I always accepted that if I kept the blue car I might not ever be able to sell it, I did toy with the idea on more than one occasion. But those glimmers never came to anything, even after twice-the-expected-cost full restoration in 2018, when I seriously entertained some offers.
So, the car stayed, and things got easier with the kids growing up (including a daughter from a second marriage), my career established, and more time on my hands. But it was never my car.
Then last spring I pulled off the winter cover of this beloved blue car that I have kept in trust these so many years and I spent a few hours fiddling with the things that needed doing to wake it from its winter slumber…things that I never seemed to have the patience or time for before. There was always a soccer game to get to, a lawn to mow, dinners to make, a project due. That spring morning, I settled down to the steady work and the feel of tools in my hands and the satisfaction of going through the checklist and of things getting accomplished (not without the odd blip here and there…this is, after all, a 53-year-old car). When I was done, I gave the car a careful and loving wash. I took a shower, and got dressed, and put on some lipstick (I always wear lipstick when driving the blue car) and got behind the wheel with Leo my golden doodle beside me, and I took to some spectacular winding roads through the Green Mountain Forest in Vermont. Roads the blue car is made for. The leaves were that bright shade of green that only lasts a moment as they unfurl from their tight buds, every river and stream was running high, and the sky was a brilliant blue. And I lost track of time and forgot to eat lunch and flirted with the men who admired my set of wheels and came back late in the day with a car that was mine. Just like that. It took my breath away.
“If you keep it Susan, drive it.”
Yes, I drove it for all those years. But I didn’t drive it the way it is meant to be driven…the way I was implored in that simple sentence from an amazing man who was dying from a brain tumor, and who was telling me about a car and about so much more. I see that all now. Make it my own. Enjoy it. Live it. Look forward. Don’t let the past hold me back.
This car, my car, is going on a road trip with me. My daughter heads off to travels and then college this September and the blue car and I are hitting the road…back roads, small towns and big cities, great restaurants and roadside diners, spectacular hikes, and everything in between. A three-month coast to coast road trip and back. After 24 years I have time to reflect, to slow down, and to speed up. At my pace. The wind in my hair, the wind at my back. Looking forward. Just driving it.
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