I had some free time last night so I wrote a short (kinda cheesy) tribute to the '87 Mark VII that I've spent the summer with. No reason for this other than it's been a long time since I've written anything and I wanted to do something for fun.
The Old Blue Lincoln
I can buy an air freshener at Walmart that will supposedly fill my car with “New car smell,” whatever that is. But what about the “Old car smell?” That isn’t so easily obtained. That there is something to be earned. The old car smell is a blend of oil, grease, and wear and tear. It smells mechanical. It’s a smell with a story. It’s what would fill my brain when I lowered myself into the 1987 Lincoln Mark VII. Science tells us that smell is the sense most closely tied to psychological response. Maybe that’s at the heart of the puzzle.
It’s the puzzle that makes my mom shake her head with the, “I’m glad you guys are excited about it… but for the life of me I just don’t understand,” smile. It doesn’t make sense. We don’t make sense. Car guys are weird. Normal people buy a car to transport themselves and groceries or to look good. Cars are either equivalent to a vacuum cleaner or a peacock’s feathers.
So the old Lincoln didn’t make sense. It was never an appliance or a status symbol for me. It didn’t go particularly fast. With primer spots and tattered paint it wasn’t pretty. It sure as heck wasn’t practical. “Wrestling a guitar amp in and out of the back seat of a foxbody,” is right up with “Driving a riding lawn mower into a spruce tree,” on the list of things I’ve done once and would prefer to never do again.
But none of those things mattered because in the old Lincoln on a summer evening, pulling from 30 to 50mph, two things would happen. I would smile and I would forget about life’s little troubles. All those little things that bother a person throughout the day would go flying out the window and drown in a cocktail of small-block Ford burble and straight pipe symphony. I enjoyed it. Or it might be more accurate to say I appreciated the beast for exactly what it was.
It was an old blue Lincoln with a soul. I couldn’t but help project a character onto the car, the old fighter who doesn’t have the moves of his youth but hasn’t lost any of the guts. There’s a story there. It was embedded in the mechanical smell and was told with a gruff V8 voice every time it cleared its throat and rolled away from a stop sign. That story was in every bounce, creak, and foxbody-shimmy as the old cruiser rolled over pock-marked Michigan roads. It’s intoxicating and strangely emotional. I’ve only had the car for one summer and I’m genuinely sad that it has to go live somewhere else now.
But to most people it’s just a gas guzzling pig that took up space and left oil spots on the driveway. Not old enough to be an attractive classic but not new enough to be a nice useful car.
But to some of us, to the real car guys, it makes sense. Yeah, we’re weird.
