Forever Hopeful

Or why I bought a white car . . .

I started this post a few weeks ago before the October 7th terrorist attack on Israel. Since then, I have not felt like writing.

Maybe I was rendered speechless by the constant social media influx of atrocities committed by those bent on satisfying an ancient and inherited bloodlust. A few lines written about what the paint color of various cars from my past say about life seems trivial compared to the blood painted doorposts of the innocents slaughtered by Hamas.

However, trivialities are the stuff of life and are often part of our emotional recovery, so here goes.

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In a fit of unexplained abandon around this time last year, I bought a slightly used Alfa Romeo sedan. Now before you commit me to the nervous hospital for a non-Parkinson’s head examination, you should know that this purchase was not unusual for me. I have been known to make eccentric automotive purchases in the past.

What was unusual was the color of the Alfa. It was white, a color not associated with my purchase history¹. Now that I drive one, I have become aware of just how many white cars are out there. During rush hour, the traffic in front of me looks like a marshmallow sea.

Not since Henry Ford’s early directive that all Fords be painted black has there been such a uniformity in color. Some studies report that 80% of cars sold today are painted in the black/gray/white spectrum. Maybe the popularity of certain colors better reflect America’s hopefulness rather than the personality of the individual driver. Since all I have to draw from is family experience, let’s go with that.

A couple of years before I was born, my dad purchased a brand new 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 in Skylight Blue, a color more tropical in tone than turquoise. The purchase was significant for a couple of reasons. The Galaxie was our family’s first brand new car with all the practical warranties and assurances inherent therein. There’s a luxury in reliability.

Secondly, the purchase represented our rise out of the Reconstruction induced and Great Depression enhanced agrarian poverty that was common throughout the South and absorbed us into the consumer-driven middle class. The car’s name and color still mishmashes in my mind visions of moon shots and stock car races.

It wasn’t long before catastrophe’s gravitational pull snatched the car from underneath the shed where my brother had parked it and hurled it down the driveway into a tree. Or that was my brother’s story until he admitted to leaving the parking brake off after returning from a non-approved drive to the local store. Thankfully, I didn’t exist yet to witness my dad’s reaction but I imagine that his words were a darker shade of blue than the hopefulness promised by Skylight Blue.

We kept the Galaxie until my dad traded it in on a brand new 1976 Ford Elite coupe in Bright Yellow with a half-landau top and twin (YES! TWIN!) opera windows perfect for those Saturday nights when we might want to listen to Aida or the Grand Old Opry. The opera windows also gave us a glimpse of the gas pump tally whenever my mother was forced to top off the fuel tank of the “big banana” as my squirmy elementary school friends dubbed the Elite. A Bright Yellow Ford - such hopeful intent sprayed on with tragic effect, but then it was the 1970’s.

My dad finally decided that he was tired of our Elite propping up OPEC and traded it in on a 1978 VW Rabbit in Ceylon Beige or as I called it: Flesh. Yep, just like the old Crayola crayon color. And the Rabbit had a tan vinyl interior. Flesh on flesh - sounds like a lost Dylan album.

I recognize that during the 1960’s VW earned a quirky reputation in their approach to automotive marketing but I question their taste when a middle-school aged child is reminded of Rabbit flesh whenever he thinks about his parent’s car. The Rabbit later burned to a crisp on a trip to Asheville due to a faulty fuel injection line. The incident was determined to be VW’s fault so in a fit of German efficiency they replaced the roasted Rabbit with another identical flesh on flesh model.

By the late 1970s, my family’s optimism along with America’s had followed the automotive color arc from Skylight Blue to Ceylon Beige. Understandably so considering our political and economic state. To call it a beige era would be an understatement. The Carter Presidency was nothing if not the color of saltine crackers - much like Biden’s.

Then came the 1980’s. America celebrated the return of morning (mourning?) with Reagan’s election. Meanwhile, my dad looked eastward toward Japan where he found a fuel efficient 1981 Datsun 510 sedan in a snappy Marine Blue - not quite Skylight Blue but certainly not Ceylon Flesh².

We drove the Datsun until an old man driving a 1970 Granada Gold (Detroit’s way of saying brown) Pontiac station wagon ran a stop sign and destroyed the Datsun thus proving Newton’s second law of motion (force = mass x acceleration). Since his station wagon weighed three times as much as the Datsun, he walked away unscathed while my mother and I did not. Lesson learned? The color of your car does not change physics.

Why did I buy a white car? Am I following the rest of America into the gray spectrum? Does the purchase suggest a personality change? Some Parkinson’s patients who have DBS surgery report a post-operation personality change. You could check with my friends but I don’t think that is the answer. Or did I act on impulse - displaying another Parkinson’s medication side effect? Nah.

The white paint was really just a blank canvas inviting me to start another chapter in my life.

I am, if nothing else, forever hopeful.

1. Countless psychological studies have linked an individual’s preference for car color with certain personality traits. Other sales driven studies track the popularity of specific car colors. Having owned more red cars than any other color, I can attest to the puzzled looks from strangers who expect me to have a “red car personality” and then find out that I don’t.

2. Detroit’s Big Three were no better with their marketing efforts. During the 1980’s, if you wanted to know the colors available for next-year’s Lincoln or Cadillac models, you only had to look at the color trends of this years female undergarments, or so I read somewhere. Chrysler was even worse by offering faux wood panels on its fresh for the 80’s K-car (not to be confused with K-pop or K-cups).