Our favorite movies feature cars, even cars that can fly, and interesting interactions are always taking place in movie cars. We are more likely to break good and bad news while driving than at the dinner table. There are no handy bowls of spaghetti to dump on heads, no one stalks off to their bedroom, and there’s no television to drown out voices.

The worst that can happen during an argument is that the car will be directed head on into a telephone pole, which tends to make bad news moot. We don’t yet have a car that can fly, or one that can  avoid head on collisions with poles, but we still conduct landmark moments in our cars.

This is why there is so much violence on buses and subways; commuters don’t have cars; they may not even have dinner tables. A person can still dump their spaghetti over your head, but it gets the sofa really messy.

When I was growing up, we learned to kiss, and then ‘neck’, and then ‘pet’ in our cars. Kids, who are under a great deal of pressure to keep up with kids who live in other countries, learn these things now on the school bus, on the way home from school. This saves time, which is better spent on video games.

Learning these things on the school bus in front of their classmates doesn’t bother them.

Modern kids are not being raised with shame and guilt and therefore adults are regularly treated to all kinds of things we would rather not see. We have only ourselves to blame. Trying to be a better parent than your own parents can only lead to disaster.

(These same kids who perform fellatio in front of everyone they know, and sometimes leave feces on the floors of the school bathrooms, say “Ewwww” about everything else, like broccoli or Brussels sprouts.)

Soon, this new generation, used to a general lack of privacy and never having learned discretion, who take lessons from politicians about how to send pornographic pictures of themselves to their friends, will be learning lessons of ‘love’ right on the classroom floor.

Or the teacher’s lounge, which in terms of being germ-free, may be marginally better than the classroom floor.

My father tried to get to know my first boyfriend by beginning a conversation about his car. “Four on the floor” was the only reply my boyfriend seemed able to muster, which was enough for me, because my boyfriend knew other things that didn’t require a lot of talk, but my father felt he should have had more in his conversational arsenal.

I don’t think this young man ever acquired more topics, but he is immortalized in the family annals, anyway.

This boy owned a Capri. The Capri had a stick shift and bucket seats, and came after the cars with the big bench seats in the 50s and 60s that were instrumental in starting so many new American families.

Through an agreement with the Department of Health and Human Services, the Ford Corporation developed the stick shift to slow the boom in population and teen pregnancies.

It slowed it down for about thirty seconds. Pantyhose managed to slow it down another thirty seconds, but hormones eventually prevailed. Now, everyone wears jeans; some babies are even born wearing Levis.

This is a good thing. Jeans are much harder to negotiate than pantyhose.

My first car was a 1940s black Plymouth. I liked to wear my coonskin cap while driving, which Davy Crockett himself had given me. Fifi, our big poodle, would sit next to me, riding shotgun. If you were a Davy Crockett devotee, you absolutely needed a shotgun.

“Riding shotgun” was not just a figure of speech. Fifi was a crack shot.

My parents were a little nervous about letting a two year-old get behind the wheel, especially before power steering was invented, but like most Americans, I was born to drive.

Later on, my dad bought a VW and a Rambler. The very back of the VW was where I sat, and from there could make a pulling motion, and truckers in back of us obligingly blew their horns for me. This caused my father to run the car off the road, and this really ticked him off.

He did buy an orange Gremlin years later, which I eventually inherited through virtue of the number of dents I put in it. Signing the title of this car over to me may have been his way of paying me back.

In return, my mom bought him a Jaguar to convince him he was still young and hot. We used the Jag when giving visitors directions to the house. It rarely ran, and was always in the driveway.

This may have been my mother’s way of paying back my dad for trying to kill me with the Gremlin.

My father was too busy with his midlife crisis, sailing his boat, and being with his twenty-something girlfriend, to remember to tell me to regularly change the oil and get the brakes checked in the Gremlin. He must have given up on the Jaguar, and figured the sailboat was a better way to get to third base with the girls.

It’s harder to hop out of a boat when it’s out at sea, or demand to be driven home. This is the reason so many men dream of owning a sailboat. It is not from love of the sea, but the motion of the ocean.

I was just learning to drive stick, so, on a hill, when I drove the Gremlin, I would have a passenger put her foot on the brake, while I put mine on the clutch and shifted. Parallel parking on hills was a challenge, but I solved it by going in head first.

The Gremlin required very little maintenance, mainly because I was in charge of it, and completely ignorant of such things. I was eventually driving down steep coastal roads with virtually no brakes. The key had broken off in the ignition, and I could just hop in, turn it, and go.

My dad did make sure I took a race driving course, which has actually saved my life a few times. Having brakes that work is also good for saving your child’s life, but that is another issue.

A friend and I took a road trip to Los Angeles in the Gremlin when we were nineteen. I had put a sign in the back window that said ‘Day Sleeper’ and we thought that was hilarious. I don’t remember the Gremlin ever breaking down, so whatever anyone else has to say about this car, I have fond memories of it. I even wrote an epic poem about our road trip that began with these deathless words:

Two girls were Gremling down the road, when they noticed a small green GTO. They noticed it because of two cute guys, who kept on giving them the eye.

I was gratified to hear from Wordsworth and Keats, who contacted me for lessons in poetry, and how to check out cute people in neighboring cars. My friend and I made contact with these two and spent a night on the beach, where I naturally got lost because I didn’t have my glasses when I took a walk along the shore.

God was riding shotgun on these trips, because none of my friends or I were dispatched by serial killers and buried in a ditch, nor did we end up as Amtrak stew when we drove over the tracks right under a swinging light signaling an oncoming train.

In my memory, that train was three feet away, blaring its horn. I must have thought the signal was merely a suggestion, not meant to be taken seriously.

On Saturday nights, I would pack my friends in the Gremlin, and we would cruise downtown Portland, checking out the boys, and hopping in and out of each others cars. Cruising is forbidden today, which really ticks teenagers off, so they ride buses and subways, looking for weaker teens who are alone, and they beat them up.

If they could cruise in their cars, downtown, and learn to kiss and neck in peace, they would not be out at night committing acts of violence. And perhaps you would get those grandchildren you want sooner than you expected.

The Gremlin replaced a car my dad bought for my sister and I, which my friends immediately dubbed Studley Deepthroat, after the movie that had been playing continuously in a downtown Portland theater since it was released.

Studley, whose make and model escapes me now, did not last long, unlike the movie. It had a deep rumble, and I still love that sound.

My parents liked to tell stories of the cars they rode in when they were growing up. My mother and her sisters rode in the rumble seat of a 1920s Ford on a two lane highway that would later become infested with billboards, motels, and fast food restaurants.

As cars and road trips go, nothing beats a helicopter. My dad and I brought back the new Messerschmitt helicopter his company bought in the 1980s. We flew in a horseshoe pattern from the northeastern states, down across Texas, and back up through California to Oregon.

My dad’s system of GPS was to hover over freeway signs so we’d know if we were going the right way.

My dad was not a race car driver, but he was an ace pilot. He’d do barrel rolls in the helicopter, trying to make people lose their lunch. He never did this with me, but I didn’t need impressing.

He knew nap-of-the-earth flying, so well the German air force wanted him to teach it there, even though my dad was on the side of the war that helped blow up their buildings.

Nap-of-the-earth in no way involves lying down in the grass on a sunny day and dozing off in the shade of your rotor blades. It has to do with flying real low and avoiding enemy fire. So, hovering over freeway signs was good practice.

As part of her midlife crisis, after my mom grew up, got married, raised us four kids, and divorced my dad, because he was having way too much fun on his midlife crisis, she bought an Avanti. The sheer number of cars coming in and out of the family may have been the cause of the divorce.

The Avanti was a seriously cool car. Its controls were on the ceiling, just like an airplane. My friends and I would race along Pacific Highway at night in my mom’s pride and joy, but I never hurt it.

My nephew was more careless, and wrecked at least five cars before his career in wrecking cars was finished. I’m still talking about it, and it’s been thirty years since he did this. Thirty years after someone hit me while I was driving my dad’s El Camino, he was still talking about it.

It is the Circle of Life.

There were other cars in my life, and other stories. The first car I bought on my own was an MG, which I drove while I was based in New York and flying for Pan Am. I fondly hoped it could withstand the city streets. I was wrong.

There are New York potholes that have swallowed Mercedes whole. It would really irk other drivers when I tried to avoid those holes, and irking New Yorkers is not hard to do.

After I grew up and had a little Pepper of my own, we rode in a Toyota station wagon for fourteen years, then a van, and now, a pick up truck. I have not had any landmark moments in any of the later cars, mostly because I no longer need to kiss and neck in a car. I have a bed and a house.

I was able to put both feet flat on the ceiling of the Toyota while I had it in cruise control, and that qualifies as a landmark moment. It is not something you see every day. Although, during my first weeks in Las Vegas, I did see a girl in a dress hop over to the driver in a Jeep, and cover his head with her dress. This was not something we learned in traffic safety class.

Nowadays, I avoid driving. I hate traffic, I never wear dresses, anymore, and putting my feet on the ceiling has lost its appeal.

Traffic, and really long sneaker shoelaces designed to come untied and trip us, were invented by Chinese communists, to distract us from their increasing population.Their original plan was to take over our country through sheer numbers, but they found out how good they were at making cheap stuff, and that we would buy it, especially if we did not need it.

Now, they plan to take over America when our garages are full, and our cars are parked on the streets and vulnerable to attack.

Don’t worry about it though; Fifi is at the ready with her shotgun, wearing my old coonskin cap.

Get this blog on your Kindle! How convenient!

To share it, which your friends will thank you for, just push one of those pretty buttons below-