An Anniversary worth noting and celebrating.
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| The welcoming highway beckons to me. This is what my drivers license has delivered. |
It's been over Fifty years since I obtained my drivers license. In many ways it was perhaps the best day of my life.
This anniversary was something that I'd overlooked. For some reason I thought that I was going to turn 66 years of age this year. I'd forgotten that actually I'd turned 66, last year!
I hadn't really thought about all this until yesterday.
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| The love affair continues, almost fifteen years later. |
I was driving my '96 Mustang back home after giving my Daughter a ride to work. I was in no hurry to get home and drove the twenty miles back on surface streets.
It was a beautiful, clear, high 60's, late Winter day in the Bay Area. I've lived my entire life in the Bay Area, except for those few years that I lived down in Southern California. I've always taken all this beautiful weather for granted. Recent news coverage of the situation in Texas and the Southeastern Coast, reminds me that I live in an environmental anomaly.
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| All it takes is the music to bring it all back. |
I was listening to music and had selected an early 70's Pop anthology CD. I've collected a few of these 60's and 70's anthologies over the years. I would search the bargain CD displays at big drug stores and supermarkets. I know that CDs are old technology, on line purchasing of digital tracks that are made into custom playlists are the current thing. Except that I don't have a Smart phone to buy and store them on, and then use Bluetooth to play them over my car's stereo system.
My thoughts were interrupted by a loud, crackling, popping, raucous exhaust note, and I saw a late model black Mustang fastback pass alongside of me in the right hand lane. It was obviously equipped with an aftermarket exhaust system. It was just as obviously a new supercharged four cylinder model. There was a twenty something young woman with bright maroon hair driving. She had some unidentifiable music blasting at a high volume. When she came to a stop in front of a tire store she just let it rip, and wound the motor out, producing a horrible sound.
This was in direct contrast to the mellow basso profundo notes that emanated from from the tips of my Mustang's FlowMaster exhaust. I had my windows down while listening to some hits of the early 1970's. At a reasonable volume of course. I left every stoplight on a gentle swell of acceleration. Of course I'm prejudiced, but not many engines sound better than a healthy V8.
While I respect the performance available from Ford's new supercharged straight four, I think that the exhaust note just doesn't fit in with the Mustang, at least when it has been made overpowering loud.
I continued my drive enjoying both sources of my own choices of music, the CD player and the Mustang's exhaust.
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| Rat Rods led to Rockabilly led to Big Band and Swing. |
While I have grown to appreciate and enjoy Big Band music from the 1940's, it's not something that I grew up with. I don't continue to listen to it, out of nostalgia. That music was already super old as I was growing up. Grandparents listened to that kind music! It was even too old for the Lawrence Welk show that I watched on TV as I visited my own Grandfolk's house as a kid. Nostalgia for me is Disco!
I started freshman year of high school in the fall of 1969 and graduated in 1973.
I was just watching a Netflix movie about the trial of the Chicago Seven following the Chicago Democratic convention of 1969, and was reminded of all the social turbulence of the times that I was growing up in. That was the bad part. There was also the hope that Society could change, for the better. Besides the unrest there was the music. There was such a wide range of music, Pop, Rock, Soul and R&B. It was all free on the AM radio. Like Thomas Murray has written, it provides the link to my memories of the past.
I received my driving permit at 15 and a half, during the Summer between my Freshman and Sophomore years. I took driver's education classes at a small, cramped, office in a downtown Oakland driving school. I took my "behind the wheel" driver's training class with Mr. Joe Vanni, who would be my PE instructor for my last years of high school.
This song brings back the old days or should I say the "Old Skool!"
The car was equipped with an extra brake pedal for the instructor and only soothing music, like the currently popular Carpenters, was allowed on the radio. One song in particular remains centered in my recollections, even more than "Rainy Days and Mondays." It was by the Five Stair Steps, "Ooh Child..." I must have heard that song a hundred times during those lessons. I don't blame Joe for controlling the music selection, I imagine that it was already stressful enough being in the car with untrained exuberant teen aged student drivers. After completing this course, it took two trips on the bus back and forth from the DMV to get all my paperwork squared away.
My driver's permit held even greater meaning for me since it meant that I could ride a motorcycle on my own! I didn't need anybody else along with me. In fact, I was expressly forbidden from carrying any passengers. The old Honda 50 that my Dad had bought several years ago was still sitting in the garage. It could barely haul me around, let alone another person.
It occurred to me that listening to this 70's music marked me as someone that is getting to be pretty old. High School was almost fifty years ago, then I realized that I've been driving for over fifty years!
This was the event that I had been dreaming of for so long. I had spent my entire childhood with an overpowering fascination with cars and motorcycles. I would fantasize about fixing up an old car and using it to escape the boring confines of my childhood.
It was one of the Modern American rites of passage to adulthood. After this would follow high school graduation. After that, who knows? The presence of the War and the draft still loomed ahead in an uncertain future.
But driving was the thing that would open up the greatest opportunities of freedom.
Looking back over those fifty years, did I expect too much? Did having my license provide me with the kind of experiences that I had hoped for?
The answer is an unequivocal, yes!
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| We all have to start somewhere. |
My association with motorcycles provided me with an extra measure of freedom. At a young age I owned my own machine. It was economical enough that I could afford to spend hours riding around, exploring the Bay Area back roads. Later I would move on to much bigger and more powerful motorcycles, and I rode them all over the Country, and beyond.
Cars were never forgotten, and I owned several, that are fondly remembered today. But it wasn't until I was older and married with a family, that I took long road trips in a car. I had done all my earlier long hauling on two wheels.
I even depended on my driver's license for my livelihood. But this only added to my enjoyment and love of driving.
So, is it the driving or is it the vehicle?
I think that it's both.
The vehicle is analogous to the instrument to the musician. It's the means of creating the act of expression. I know that this sounds pretty pretentious. The commuter stuck in miles and hours of bumper to bumper traffic probably doesn't share my highfalutin opinion of being behind the wheel.
There is no driving without a vehicle. Theoretically all those miles could have been experienced as a passenger.
But that wouldn't have been driving. Maybe it's not that bad being the passenger. I know that my Wife prefers that status.
Time is passing, it seems too rapidly. Some awful day I'm not going to be able to drive anymore.
As Peter Egan once wrote, "There are only so many Summers left."
I don't plan on wasting any of them.
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