and Words
Yeah
I′ve been tryna call
I’ve been on my own for long enough
Maybe you can show me how to love, maybe
I′m goin’ through withdrawals
You don’t even have to do too much
You can turn me on with just a touch, baby
I look around and
Sin City′s cold and empty (oh)
No one′s around to judge me (oh)
I can’t see clearly when you′re gone
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
Back in March 2020, the world shut down. They instructed us to work from home until it all passed; they non-ironically speculated that it’d be a few weeks. We packed up our laptops, but our considerably more powerful desktop machines remained at work. Being nowhere but home started to drive us a bit batty. Our transition from ‘work’ to ‘home’ mode occurred in single-digit minutes. A teammate had a brilliant idea; upon ending his ‘work’ day, he’d get in his car and ‘drive’ home. I don’t know where he went, nor how long he’d drive, but he ‘drove’ home to help him separate from work.
This is genius. Driving is therapeutic. I lived in Fort Lauderdale when I got my driver’s license, and their public transportation system sucked. Most classmates spent their sixteenth birthdays waiting in line for hours to get their driver’s licenses. While I got my license when I was sixteen, I didn’t do it on my birthday. Truthfully, I looked upon driving with a certain apathy, though that changed.
As a software developer, I’ve had my share of design problems with which I struggled. I’ve solved a disproportionately high number of those while driving a car. It’s in the power of diffused thinking, but it’s not about solving problems. It never was.
I got my first real car as I approached the start of college at the University of Miami. School was less than an hour’s drive from my home in Fort Lauderdale. I attended classes during the week and would often drive home for the weekends. Initially, Lisa, my 1966 Ford Mustang, served as nothing more than transportation. Eventually, that drive north on US1 onto the very start of I-95 northbound, which became my playground.
For years, this corridor functioned as my joyride and commute. I’ve driven those roads in both afternoons and nights both ways (I didn’t do mornings. 😉). The hot Florida afternoons baked the black pony interior to temperatures that should not touch bare skin. A few minutes of driving with the windows down allowed enough air to circulate to cool things down. Those seats cooled from ‘unbearable’ to ‘extraordinarily unpleasant’.
I drove mostly with the windows down, both to maximize the feeling of speed and to keep cool. The wind buffeted everything in the car; anything that wasn’t weighed down risked flying out the window into the city. Thieves stole my stereo after breaking into my car on campus during freshman year, though it hardly mattered. Even upon installing a stereo years later, the rushing wind drowned out the music most of the time.
Lisa was temperamental. The suspension in the car was sloppy. The brakes (both discs and drums) eventually stopped the car. When I dared drive it over 65 mph, the rear-view mirror shook so much that I could not make out anything in its reflection. However, those roads awaken a spirit in me that remains today.
Eventually, the maintenance of that car overwhelmed me with the ability to attend school, and I moved to a more practical Ford Thunderbird. It was more practical and more comfortable, but not nearly as fun to drive.
A wide array of blue cars adorned my driveways. The next blue car was a 1969 Chevy Camaro SS. In my relative youth, I insisted on a classic sports car, and I got one. It felt and drove similarly to the Mustang. Built with 1960s technology, it was similarly plagued with problems. When I drove it for a long enough time, the starter motor would heat up and fail. I had to wait until it sufficiently cooled before I could drive it again. On one night, as I came off the freeway, the brakes failed. I eventually realized that I’d rather spend my weekends on activities that did not involve automotive maintenance.
A blue 1994 Honda Civic Del Sol followed. This may have been the car that I have driven the most miles. I enjoyed driving it on sunny days with the top off, which may be stashed in the trunk. It was a small two-seater and cozy. However, as fun as it was, it still had the spirit of a Honda Civic. To accommodate the large targa top, the trunk had ample room. This car was the epitome of reliability; I literally never worried about driving it. It was also the first car I owned with a manual transmission.
Years later, on a friend’s suggestion, I test drove a Lotus Elise, and it captivated my attention. I couldn’t buy that particular car; it was charcoal gray. This car was in extraordinarily high demand, and the dealership could only get a loaner pre-production model for prospective buyers. I whimsically put down a deposit on that car, thinking that I’d end up backing out before the estimated nine months before delivery. As luck would have it, they got one in Laser Blue within three months. The car looked stunning, but I didn’t care for the tan interior. The attentive salesperson remembered that another customer preferred the tan interior over the black on their burgundy Elise. He coordinated with the service shop and arranged to swap the interiors. That’s how I came to drive a 2005 Laser Blue Lotus Elise.
The Elise drives like a dream. It’s so low to the ground that I could open the car door, lean my shoulder out about four inches, and pick up the newspaper from my driveway. You needed to be almost a contortionist to ingress and egress. Furthermore, the two seats were separated by less than two inches. The interior was Spartan, lacking even the convenience of a cup holder for a drink. That said, once you were strapped in, it was fun to drive.
In 2021, sixteen years after I had gotten the Elise, my company gave us an extra day off. They called it a Play Day. I scheduled a test drive of another sports car at that same dealership on that day. It would be a joyride, just to see what it’d be like. I drove my Elise to the dealership for that test drive. The salesperson eyed the Elise even before the test drive; he insisted that he could get me a great trade-in for the Elise.
That new car enchanted me. The salesperson made good; he offered me about 80% of what I paid for the car sixteen years before. My wife sat next to me at the dealership. The moment the salesperson walked away, she suggested that I buy that new car. This new car was marginally more practical, slightly roomier, and more comfortable. She’d be more comfortable riding in it. I caved.
These days, I climb into my sports car for that spirited drive. Seconds after I start the engine, my phone wirelessly connects with my Lotus Evora. I ease out of my garage into my driveway while I prepare everything else. I navigate through the menus until I find the “Driving Tunes” playlist with a picture of my car on this very driveway as its album cover. I start that playlist and hit the accelerator.
Inevitably, ‘Blinding Lights’ comes through the speakers. It quickens my pulse and takes me back to the nights of driving ferociously on the streets of Miami. It’s reminiscent of those days spent dancing into the wee hours of the night in the warm tropical nights, independent of season. I can almost see the streetlights that illuminate I-95 pass by to the beat of the music. It’s hypnotic.
I feel a twinge of guilt when I drive this car. It’s an incredible piece of engineering, and I’m not skilled enough to drive it in the way that it deserves to be driven. Furthermore, I don’t drive it nearly enough. Though when I drive it on the open road, it brings me pure joy. The car moves; nay, it dances, to the rhythm of my every gesture. The accelerator and suspension respond almost telepathically. It’s a symbiosis between car and human.
Perhaps someday I’ll drive it on the streets of Miami in the way that I drove in my youth. I’m not sure if that’ll ever happen, but that simple idea fascinates me.