Auto Biography IV

“Blue Thunder”

 



I bought my first car two days before moving out of my parents’ house. It was a 1974 Dodge Dart Swinger, 2 door, slant 6, blue with a white vinyl top, and a hole in the muffler. When I started it up, it sounded like a Sea King helicopter, and since I had just seen the movie “Blue Thunder” (about a stealth police chopper by the same name), the car was aptly christened. It cost $1500 and took me two years to pay off.

I loved that old junker. I must have done: twenty-five years and three vehicles later, I discovered the license plate in a box of mementoes I’d forgotten I had.

For three years (though it seemed longer), Thunder got me to and from work. It taxied my friends and me to/from church, town, and all over the darned place when gas was 42 cents a litre and my bi-weekly take home was $428. It was a big blue boat of a vehicle that was hit twice in the rear (took it well both times) and almost—almost—displayed a Duran Duran sticker on its back bumper.

I still have the bumper sticker.

The radiator blew up and the muffler finally fell off, the paint was oxidized and bubbling with rust, but Thunder was mine. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t the car of my dreams. It was my first important purchase. It was my independence, a step toward starting my life as myself; not as my parents’ daughter or my siblings’ sister, but as me, as Ruth, as – gods help us all – an adult. It wasn’t the shiniest symbol of my emergence from the family cocoon, but with that hoarse rumbling cough, it was certainly the loudest.

I wonder why that seemed appropriate?

the rear view, sans DD bumper sticker!