CARS.

My dad was a car guy. He lovingly washed his car each Saturday. When I became tall enough to reach the middle of the roof, he paid me $15., a handsome some them, to wash it. Every season, he applied Turtle Wax rubbing it lovingly into the outside of the car and buffing it away with a chamois. Water beaded up on the paint of dad's car like wax on a candle. Similarly, he was a shade-tree mechanic and did his own brake jobs, tune-ups, etc. We could be traveling down the road and he would say, "Hear that, Larry. My right-front tire needs air. This was in the era when tires had inner-tubes and white sidewalls. Before radial tires. That gene did not live long in my body. Outside of the $15 for washing the car. 

Cars in those days were caressed by owners in the way AR-15s are caressed today in Republican circles. Gasoline was 39 cents/gallon. It was leaded. Nobody bought regular, and service stations offered not only service, but were staffed with mechanics, not cashiers. Cars In those days also had great names. The elegant chrome name on the rear fender. Impala, Bel-Air, Thunderbird, Corvette, Mustang. even the Hudson Hornet. Cars had a certain panache about them, not to mention 500 lbs of chrome. 

The shine has fallen from the car, along with the steel abd chrome. Running water while washing your car is no longer tolerated. Cars are a mode of transport, now. Nothing more. Twice in 50 years we have had to weather high prices due to international oil crisis. Gasoline today is in the neighborhood of $4.79/gallon. You wash your own windshields and check your own oil. On the other hand, you can get a Slurpy and Pringles chips.

The worst thing to happen to cars is that there is no longer an effort made to give a car an elegant name. Who ever heard of a Camry? The least attractive name in the 60s was Buick. We would compare it to throwing up after a night of drinking. The least attractive name today might be the Toyota TRD. It stands for Toyata Racing Division but some of us of an ireverent bent, pronounce it turd. How would you like a Forester? How about a Tundra? "I'm taking the Tubra to the market, dear". "Don't forget your mukluks, honey". Volt's not bad name but how would you like a Tucson? Why not a Tuscan, its not an impossibly hot place with poisonous reptiles. But the worst, absolutely most stupid name a car executive could come up with goes to Jeep, for its Rubicon. Nobody in the vaunted corner offices ever asked the question, "why would we name a car built to cross rivers after a river that should not be crossed? Why not build a bass boat and call it Achilles? 

Cars once had Romance, besides in the vack seat. They got maybe 15 MPG on highway driving but we loved them. Today's cars are built by technocrats. We get 30 mph on a bad day. They have seat belts, air bags, and even back-up cameras. Yet  irony is not understood.