This is a Buick 8.
At least I think it is.
I don't know. I'm not that good at cars. Or wasn't. I'm getting to be.
There was a time I wasn't good at dinosaurs. I mean I loved them. We all do. And then I got good at them. Because of Kiernan. I used to know five of them. When I was a kid we had five dinosaurs. Now there are hundreds. So many of them. And I'll wager I could now name more dinosaurs than any member of my family save one. Kiernan could easily best me at this. But no one else could. I'm a stone-cold Dinosaur Master now. Because of Kiernan.
Same thing with the Solar System. I didn't know a thing about dwarf planets before I learned them with him. Now I can Haumea with the best of them.
Because of Kiernan.
And here we are at cars.
Tonight I got him in the shower and he asked me to read to him. "No. Not tonight. I just want you to get the sand out of your hair." He went to the beach with his mom and Gammy and Grance two days ago and still we wake up with sand in the sheets. "There's sand in the sheets," he said sleepily yesterday morning. There was a tinge of accusation in the tone. As if I'd loaded the sheets with sand as part of some new program I was trying out.
So he asked me to read to him in the shower and I decided I didn't want to tonight and he said, "Okay. Then will you come in here and talk to me about cars?"
Will you come in here and talk to me about cars.
Good lord. They say certain traits skip a generation. My dad, Kiernan's Pap-Pap, loves cars. He knows them. He can work on them. I don't know cars. All my life my dad has told me about his various cars. Jaguars he's owned that would make a car enthusiast's mouth water. Right now he owns a Morgan. Nothing ever sparked in me. And now my kid is talking years of cars and making lists of cars. He loves them.
Because of me. As it turns out.
"Where did this car thing come from?" He asked me this in the shower, as he cleaned himself and I sat on the floor, talking about cars.
"I think it came from the Slug Bug Game," I replied.
"I think it came from a dog walk, when you pointed out the car logos. You pointed out the symbols."
I beamed. I didn't mean to.
However we got to this point, we are here. This boy is nuts about cars. Wherever we drive, he calls out the car types. If a special car passes us, he makes note of it. When we walk our dog Honey now, he wants to walk farther to streets we have not yet traveled in order to see new cars. When we drive past a car lot that has cool cars in it, he calls it out.
"Dad! We have to go back!"
Wait. I'm getting ahead of myself. I want to save that story for another post. To distill it, through that experience Kiernan learned that driving down one of the main streets near our house and scanning the car lots would reap dividends. This lot was for a business that fixes cars after they've been in collisions. There seem to be a lot of places like that along Foothill Boulevard. So on this day Kiernan was keen to go looking at similar places. "Let's go to some more car shacks!"
Alas, putting in the search term "car shacks" doesn't give you much. "Old car shacks" doesn't help, as a bunch of used car lots pop up. "Classic" in place of "old" helps a bit, and we went tracking down a few of those after a quick trip to the post office.
But first we saw this:
That's an Alfa Romeo Spider Veloce. As we drove away from the post office Kiernan saw this little flash of red and asked me, again, to turn around. This is happening more and more as we drive, and usually I just shrug it off, but today was about cruising around for cars, so I pulled a quick u-turn and pulled into the parking lot. We inspected the car, got super excited, then moved on.
The first lot was a disappointment. First of all, this day was a Sunday, and as it turns out all places that fix cars after collision are closed on Sunday. Who knew?
Still, we saw some pretty cool cars. We wandered into the lot in the picture above. They were mostly working on fairly pedestrian cars, but we found that sweet Buick 8 on the far side of the garage, and had some other finds as well. As we drove away to our next address we saw this:
I caught up with this sweet little car but we could not figure out what it was. Kiernan thinks it was some kind of Morgan. His Pap-Pap has one of those...
We pulled up next to the car to ask the driver what it was, me being keenly aware that folks do this to my dad all the time. They even follow him into his neighborhood when he's out driving. I know this simultaneously pleases and annoys him. So I was sensitive to that. Turns out I needn't have been. The guy was busy talking on the phone and smoking a cigarette. When we pulled up alongside his cool little car he glanced over at our eager faces, annoyance flashing across his face, and turned back to his conversation.
"What a jerk," one of us said.
We continued down Foothill and this caught our attention:
That's a Thunderbird. What year? I couldn't tell you. But look at him there, examining it. I love the way he views the world. There was also a Rolls Royce Silver Spur at this same lot, parked on the street to attract attention:
Yeah, that's just a twenty thousand dollar car, but still. How cool! It isn't the price tag so much as the rarity and coolness. He gets excited about so many cars. A run-down Datsun 280z will go on his list of coolest cars of the day. He doesn't care.
Oh, we keep track of the cars we've seen and discuss which was the coolest of the day. I love that too.
So this was a great day for viewing cars. We drove around a lot and were disappointed by the lots we scouted beforehand, but overall it was great.
Next up? The Petersen Automotive Museum. I'll let you know how it goes.
