In the late 80s, soon after my parents divorce, my mom got her hands on a sweet little silver Honda Civic. Not much bigger than a VW bug, but certainly with just as much personality.
If you stretch out your arms, touch your finger tips together, and round out your elbows you will have the approximate size of the steering wheel. And don’t try to tell me that your arms are longer than mine. This polished wood accoutrement could have helped an export freighter full hydrogen Hummers for Schwarzenegger turn on a dime. So as large a circle as you can physically make is probably still less in circumference than the actual wheel.
It was beautiful. Almost fragile to the touch with material and styling you would expect to see in a luxury car.
Perhaps the scalloped edge for better grasp of this slick wheel was exaggerated, but it was part of the charm.
A stick shift to rival a Mack truck stuck proudly out of the four-on-the-floor transmission. With a gear stick head to match the wheel. It was always cool. Even after the scorching of the summer sun.
A bullet-silver exterior and black interior made the wheel and stick shift glow against the monochromatic sensibility of the rest of the two-door coup.
What truly separated this beauty from the crowd, and this had to have been a rarity for the late 80s, was the manual choke. An unassuming pull to the left and down from the steering wheel. Not too much lest you flood the engine. But not enough and you may as well crank that puppy forever ‘till you’ve ground down the starter to dust.
Winters meant driving with the choke wide open until the engine was warm enough to sip gas instead of funnel it like a freshman at his first kegger.
It was a subtle mastery the like of which no other car I’ve owned has required.
Then, while visiting a friend, I backed this eloquent beauty over a wooden railroad tie and into a ditch. To be fair, my friend was warning me to be careful backing into her driveway at the time. At which point I turned my head to ask “what railroad tie?” and my hand, caressing the almost silken wood of that fantastic steering wheel, pushed the steering in the opposite direction.
I bent the frame of the only car my mother owned.
She could only replace it with a dirty, automatic shift Chevette. That car made it for years. This included me making it airborne with a car full of seven friends on the way to the movies, and getting it up to 120 on the highway just to see if I could.
After that it was the Justy. A cheap rip-off of the Civic’s classic beauty. A mechanic joked that the company called it a Justy because you were always working on it to adjusty the breaks, adjusty the alignment, adjusty the transmission.
That Civic is my Platonic ideal of a car. Reality dictates that it would probably be a mess of emissions and fossil fuel consumption. But I would get that car again in a hearbeat. And I bet it would drive me across the country and back.
(Photo can be found here at adclassix.com)
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