Firsts

Everyone has a lot of “firsts” in their lives. The ones I’m thinking of here are the milestones on your journey to becoming an adult, the ones that made you suddenly feel like you grew a foot taller, like your mind expanded to places you didn’t even know existed, like you’ve just grown quite perceptibly older and wiser.

To that end, I present to you a few of my firsts. I’d love to hear yours.

First Car
A 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. Yes, I drove a pimpmobile. It was two-tone! Metallic gray on the bottom, with light gray vinyl on top. It was my dad’s car. When we moved to Dallas in 1980, his new company helped him buy it as a perk.

Now keep in mind that when I say “first car” I do not mean “the car that I got for my very own when I acquired a driver’s license.” That did not happen. I was allowed to drive The Pimpmobile to high school on the few rare occasions that my dad did not take it to work. When I was a freshman in college in 1990, my parents came to visit me on Parents’ Weekend and instead of arriving in the Olds as I was expecting, they arrived in my dad’s brand new red sports car. The Olds was now being used by my younger brother, who was learning to drive.

I did not have a car at college until my senior year, when, much to the chagrin of both my younger brothers, who had just recently installed a state-of-the-art stereo and big new speakers, I was allowed to keep the Olds full-time. But it still wasn’t MY car; it was just on loan because I had an apartment off campus and needed to be able to make trips to the grocery store and such.

During move-in and move-out of my freshman, sophomore, and junior years in college, I was able to pack everything I owned into that car, including a mini-fridge. It was a little strange, having my life packed so neatly into a single automobile.

After I graduated, my parents sold me their 1990 Honda Accord, manual transmission (another car I loved). The last time I drove The Pimpmobile was in 1996 after somebody plowed into my Honda and sent it into the repair shop for three weeks. My dad and youngest brother were kind enough to let me borrow it so I could get to and from work.

And of course, the car had its quirks. The older it got, the quirkier the quirks became, and we used to joke that as much as we wished it would croak for good, it simply refused to. The air conditioning stopped working some time in 1989 and we never got it fixed. The ceiling lining was ripped and full of holes, and had started to sag in the middle so much that we had to hot-glue it back in place every few months. The rearview mirror would routinely fall off. The antenna was gone and the non-digital radio (yes, kids, this was back in the day when you had to turn a dial and watch the little orange bar slide left and right across the stations until you hit on one that wasn’t static) didn’t pick up stations very well at all. And the biggest quirk of all: the car nearly always died at intersections or whenever you slowed down or came to a stop. I got so good at popping the transmission into neutral, restarting the car, switching it back into drive and gently stepping on the gas, that I almost didn’t even have to think about it.

Mom was furious that dad thought this car was safe enough for her children to drive around town, but he wouldn’t sell it and get a used car for us.

And if he had, I wouldn’t have had stories nearly this good!

First Kiss
Totally not even worth mentioning. I was sixteen, and neither of us knew what we were doing. I didn’t even really like the guy, I just realized that it had to happen some time and the guy I actually wanted to kiss didn’t know I existed. So why not get it over with, with someone who was willing?

First Drink
Not counting the sips of wine that I was allowed to have with holiday dinners, the first time I drank was when I was 19. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I was prim about things like alcohol up to this point; I think it was more a combination of my own late-bloomer naivete, a straight-laced rule-following boyfriend, and not liking the behaviour of friends and acquaintances who regularly got drunk. But I was feeling rather rebellious about a lot of things at this point so I thought what the hell, I want to try it!

My friend Pete invited me to the dorm room of a mutual friend to watch movies, and we decided to illegally underagedly drink rum and cokes. He knew I hadn’t really had alcohol before, and I asked him to make mine weak but it wasn’t. And me not knowing what strong vs. weak tasted like, I drank the whole thing way too fast. I don’t remember much except lying on the floor laughing.