I Loved My Bug.
My grandmother gave me her 1972 Volkswagen Beetle.
When I was a little girl, I’d bounced around in the cargo area behind the backseat on our way to church. As an adult, I saw this area of the car as sacred and adorable. It was barely big enough to hold my snow scraper, but I’d been transported in there as a child.
This made the car even more special to me. I loved my Bug.
And the fact that my grandmother had driven it to the grocery store and to church once a week before I owned it made it even more valuable, because it only had a few thousand miles on it.
I plastered my car with peace-and-love bumper stickers, making it my very own. And I tooled around town in my VW Bug whenever I wasn’t walking – although I was often walking, since I was often drinking and I really did try not to drink and drive too often.
The car was a stick shift, which I did not know how to drive.
I’d once borrowed my cousin’s manual Triumph TR7 – with her knowledge, I swear. I’d driven it to my high school, about a mile away from my house. When I got to a stop sign on a hill, I could stop but I couldn’t get the car to go again. Every time I tried to shift gears, the Triumph would stall out. In the TR7, I drifted backwards until I found a place wide enough to whip the car around in the middle of the street, and the gears caught going downhill – which was just enough to get me back home.
So learning to drive the Beetle took awhile. But after awhile I not only learned to drive it, I mastered it. I could drive on all those Pennsylvania hills with a beer between my knees and a cigarette in one hand. When the engine revved unexpectedly at a stoplight, I would hop out and open the engine hatch in the back of the car. Then I’d flick a little metal switch that needed to be flicked, and the engine would rev properly again.
I have no idea what I’d fixed, but I figured it out and fixed it all on my own, so I felt proud. And I “fixed” it 6,000 times, so I believed I was as good as any mechanic, as long as I was fixing my own VW Bug.
I loved peeling into the parking lot at work. All of my Pennysaver friends came out and admired my new car, implying that the rusty old racing-striped Camaro was actually a hunk of junk.
I gave my VW the special premium gas every time I filled up, even though I had no idea why – or even if – it was required. I paid substantially more for the premium gas and I was poor, but I thought it deserved it.
One time I let Gregg drive the car and he got a flat tire at a stoplight. He left the car – literally, got out of my Bug and walked away – leaving my beloved car in the middle of a major intersection. He walked a mile away to his dad’s house and called me to let me know the car was there.
I didn’t wonder then if Gregg even had a driver’s license, but I do wonder now. Gregg and I broke up “for good” (at least a month) that time.
Gregg didn’t drive my car again; nobody did. I treasured it completely.
My grandmother’s car was the most amazingly wonderful vehicle I ever owned.