I learned how to drive in a hand-me-down, faded red '82 Mazda GLC hatchback as old as I was. 4-speed manual, no power steering. I spent a lot of time driving that car around the back roads of north-central Pennsylvania, seeing how fast I could take blind, wooded corners while the cows, horses, intermittent forests and future Trump supporters looked on. I loved how it felt having nothing between the car and my hands but a pure mechanical linkage. Probably not a surprise to anyone that I crashed that car. In a hurricane-turned-tropical storm that managed to dump enough rain on PA to get us out of school early. One of those blind, wooded corners turned out to have a small river running across the apex, so me and "Little Red" (as me and my friends called the car) or "The Open Wound" (as my dad called it) went sailing off the blacktop and down a short incline into a very large, thorny bush. I managed to disentangle myself, and walked shamefaced in the rain to knock on the door for the closest house. The owner kindly pulled my sad looking Mazda out of the bushes and back onto the road via the winch on his 2nd gen Ford Taurus. Yep, saved by a Ford Taurus. A Ford Taurus with a winch. It's central PA after all. The Mazda survived...barely. I drove it home, and for another few weeks. Eventually discovered (by braking hard on the highway and having the car dart out of lane with little regard for what my hands did on the wheel) that the frame was cracked. The Open Wound was soon replaced by a '94 Ford Escort, which ironically (because Escorts of the day were Mazda Protoge's in disguise) had exactly the same interior door handles. I still miss that car though.
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