With a nod to Hemingway, I would affirm that you have the "aficion," the "passion". (See "The Sun Also Rises.") Having the Beethoven soundtrack is cool, especially the Gould version. (I did not immediately wonder if you had made up the delivery guy's name, but it occurred to me later. Or did you choose Gould to match an eponym?) But if we build on the German composer motif, what strikes me more and more is that much of your writing, especially this piece, makes me think of the "Great Horn Theme" in the last movement of Brahms' First Symphony, which is about as elegiac as a work of art gets, other than maybe "Siegfried's Funeral March." At this point, something big is ending, moorings are lost, and the choir that was supposed to sing the "Ode to Joy" has moved to Texas. I suppose I care about cars too much, but dang I'm melancholy about things. Of course, I could have stopped caring when I could not keep up with the technology and could no longer set points or rotate the carburetor as I studied the chalk marks under the timing light. Not as good as sex, but in a similar dimension of joy. You have captured more than the measure of a car; you have captured (one last German bit) the zeitgeist.
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