Mark and being wombies and all did most things pretty much together throughout the early years. We went to the doctor together, shopping together, and even dressed alike until high school. With high school we started to separate - we pretty much had our own friends, had our own activities and so forth. That is why Herb was so wrong in the Nova timesharing experiment. He procured a really really nice 1968 Nova for us. The thought was that we would share it as wheels and from his point of view, it was workable. We'd ride with each other to school (10 miles to Aledo), functions, and be with each other on weekends. The buddy system had worked up to now, so what would be so tough about sharing wheels?
I don't know if it exists today, but back in those younger years one's car was a ticket to freedom. And while we were thrilled and thankful to have this fine set of wheels, the sharing thing just didn't work out. Like a boy must have a dog, so too, must a boy have his own set of wheels. Besides, the cumbersome arrangement of dropping off, picking up each other became too insurmountable.
As a result of this arrangement, I was given the option of driving my grandfather's 1963 Chevy Impala sedan. Cigar-stench, tobacco stained windows, it was a true "granny" car but it was, for all intents and purpose, my wheels.
But this isn't about the old brown Chevy that I adopted occasionally, it is about Mark and I's first car, the Nova.
There were few prettier cars in the school lot. Sure, the farmer's kids had all the new wheels and muscle cars, but for sheer beauty there were few that could match the Nova. It was so classy that Chevrolet didn't even mess with the basic styling for years .
I remember it being real tight and solid, too. Just like ourr boxer Magic's back legs, taught with muscle twitches. It was a great car: beauty mixed with great build quality. It could run, too. Mark came up with an idea to spruce it up a bit, too. He had found two "SS" decals and put them just below the Nova chrome badge on the tail. You can see it in this photo. It wasn't an SS, of course, as it had a basic V-8 307. But it didn't have the standard six-banger, either. But it could move and by no means was it a dog. One time I skipped school because the Met's were in the World Series and as I was rounding Bertelson's corner I slid on new tarred rock and did a spin job that scared me a bit, but nothing was hurt, bruised or dented, but it could have been.
It eventually, mostly through my stubbornness, became Mark's car because I rebelled (gee, I did that a lot in high school) against the notion of car sharing. I decided to get my own car, my very own. But that's another Flashback.
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