One of my first toys as a toddler was a small Hot Wheels car (it was joined by plenty more in due time). From a young age, I would peer out from the child seat while my mom drove and call out what cars and trucks were sharing the road with us. I remember being just as impressed with Nintendo NES game Rad Racer because it featured real cars (Ferrari 308 and 1987 Lotus F1 car) as I was with the racing action it portrayed. My mom made me a little racing firesuit for Halloween back in pre-school with loads of auto brand patches. I absorbed mid-1990s car culture from the magazines my dad subscribed to. PlayStation classic Gran Turismo has played an outsized role in my life.
I was primed to be a car dork. I come from car dork stock: my dad and my uncles have different flavors of The Madness, and my mom certainly didn’t mind driving a couple toddlers around in a turbocharged Volvo wagon with a five-speed back in the day. Much like the Wu-Tang Clan, turbo lag is for the children.
So that meant getting my learner’s permit and driver’s license – and then a car! – became even bigger milestones in my life. It was freedom, yes, but also all that I’d watched and seen and read about and experienced on video games now made manifest. Didn’t matter if I was driving my parent’s station wagon, I was driving, and that was enough.
My dad originally wanted to get me an old BMW 2002 coupe as a first car when I was in high school. The logic is sound – old, cool, a sporty air and capability but far from fast. Unfortunately, when we started looking, those old coupes became collector’s items. The target became something newer – and that’s how I wound up with the 1989 BMW 325iS that became my car.
Boxy ‘80s styling, the sweet sewing-machine hum of a six-cylinder engine, the finest appointments of a yuppie-mobile – what a car. And once we got some proper springs and shocks installed, it handled perfectly: taut, solid, but not quite race car hard. Certainly enough for the country roads in the suburban hills that became my favorite playground on late nights in high school and when I was back from college.
Throughout the period before I moved to Japan, that car was my constant. It became a proper commuter to summer college jobs and then graduate school, and the way I got to meet up with friends during the days spent waiting for life to get started in my early 20s. But then I did move to Japan, and stay in Japan, and so the car waited, and now it is gone.
It’s going to a good home – somebody about to retire with enough money to make a garage of collectible BMWs into near-new condition, the kind of real life Gran Turismo warehouse all the car dorks I know dream of. My dad and I talked about selling that car earlier this summer, and it was time to sell it, but it still came out of left field and still stings a little to think about. On the one hand, it was an old car that was just sitting, leaking fluids and cracking hoses and doing all the things that machines kept still do. But on the other hand, it was a tangible connection to home – I still have this back in the United States, my brain said, like a bookmark to another chapter in my life. And there was always that most wonderful elixir, potential – what if we move back? What if I went full crazy and shipped my car over here? Wouldn’t that be fun?
Growing older isn’t about age, but seeing possibilities fall away in life. In a small, personal way, selling the car I hadn’t seen in years and driven in longer is another closing of a door to a potential life I was never trulygoing to push open. I cannot lie to myself: I didn’t need my family to store an old car just to give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. But it still stings a little to think I could fly back home to visit and not be greeted by a familiar Bavarian box. (Hell, we might even have to – shock! – rent a car next time we go home. Wow.)
I’ve owned cars in Japan – two different ones, picked up through the local foreign grapevines while teaching in Nagasaki, the first even traded for the second – but not since moving up to Tokyo. Owning a car in countryside Nagasaki can be classified close to a “need”; owning a car in the greater Tokyo blob is as close to luxury as you can count. Parking rates are not cheap, and the cost of owning and operating a car in Japan in general isn’t cheap anywhere.
But now, I find myself perusing postings and strongly thinking about reinvesting what we made from the sale of my old car into a new (to me) one over here. At least our timing for sending U.S. dollars over to Japan worked out well. And while there are many options available in the budget I’ve set, I keep tabbing over to see if I can find a white BMW 3-series to fill the gap left by the one that was my car for so long. That feels like the poetic move to make.
Doug Bonham Dot Blog 