My Dad Was a Car Guy

My dad was a car guy.

We never had anything new or fancy, nothing under a hundred thousand miles. He was always bringing home beaters to race in the field, bits and pieces of classics to assemble, cars that talked (before Alexa), and junky trades for summer burn piles.

I grew up behind the wheel of trucks, tractors, an old CJ-5 Jeep, at tractor pulls, car shows, demo derbies, races. Watched my dad, a no-name in a shitty yellow car, beat the piss out of seasoned demolitionists from the grandstands at Marathon Park, and try his luck at the Tomahawk Speedway. We camped in the heat and dust at the Iola Car Show, year after year, eating steaks he marinated on the counter for days and playing drinking games with other campers. He even rescued a 1950’s Oldsmobile from a barn at his childhood home and left it to me before he died.

I was a teenager when I tried reading one of his Hot Rod magazines, hoping to understand enough that I could talk about engines with my old man (I didn’t). He looked at me like I was nuts the day I found him in the garage and asked him to teach me about cars, as if I’d ever end up underneath the hood of one myself.

When he passed—in a car accident, of all things—I let my love of all things “cars” go with him because I didn’t think I cared. It was his passion, not mine.

And then…

Then I watched one of my dad’s oldest friends load a ’67 cherry red Chevelle on a trailer for his son, and something inside me WOKE UP.

When it’s said, “they don’t make cars like this anymore,” they really DON’T MAKE CARS LIKE THIS ANYMORE. I stared at the chrome, decals, and white-walled tires with new appreciation for a classic that had been sitting in a garage for almost a decade that I never really looked at before. Then my son asked me about the knobs in the doors and I showed him how to crank down the windows, and it hit me.

My dad was a car man, and my son will never even know. Cars, to Graham, are just something generic, a vehicle to ride in. Not something to be loved, cherished, fixed up, polished, and shown off. He’ll never know the thrill of hitting the accelerator and going way too fucking fast down a country road (or he’d better not) or the privilege of taking an old truck in the field to bomb around with his friends or just blow off steam. He’ll probably never appreciate the sound or smell of a diesel engine. He won’t freeze his ass off on a late summer night when he should be in bed but he’s watching cars circle a track instead. He won’t hand Grandpa Troy tools or drive the golf cart like a banshee through the stalls at Iola and almost get kicked out.

I realized, watching Bryan—another car man—load up the Chevelle, that loving cars began with my dad, but it didn’t die with him.  

It was about to die in me.

My son would never understand or appreciate ANY of those things unless I showed him.

It took almost ten years for me to see that my dad’s love became mine too, either through experience or simply being his daughter laced my DNA with Pennzoil. I don’t know. But I don’t want this part of me to truly die. I know my son won’t have quite the Wild West childhood that I did (and that’s good) and I can’t teach him, well, anything about cars (other than how to roll down an ancient window by hand) but I can show him the way cars used to be and see if that lights his own fire.

You know, to keep the motor oil in his DNA flowing too.