Cars and relationships

   I didn't grow up in a car culture, so I haven't really ever cared much as an adult for ones that look sporty, luxurious, or have a lot of horsepower.
   When I was a child of about six or seven, I went to the New York car show. I was a fan of sports cars at that time, and recall liking the Plymouth Duster in particular. Thinking back, I believe that its' main attraction for me lied in its' logo, which looked like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon to me. That was a long time ago.
   Having lived in San Francisco (California that is!) for the past ten years, I have come to realize that it is not only a dramatically more car-based place than my native Manhattan, but that for some people, what they drive is as or more important than having a functional one to drive. For many people in this category, it seems that they might believe that their car states something a bout them.
   This became even clearer when one of my coworkers, a native, asked me my opinion on whether or not it was okay to touch another car's bumper when parallel parking. I answered that I thought that it was inevitable at times, and she was aghast! She later told me that she was fresh from an experience with another New Yorker, who had tapped the bumper of the car behind him when he had parked.
   I have thought on and off, though not too deeply, about how I feel about my own car, and more so, about whether there were objects in general that I felt as strongly about as some people seem to feel about their automobiles.
   For me, clothing comes to mind as being important, but more in the sense of liking to look a certain way than believing that it says anything important about me. I have always tried to avoid obvious labels of any kind for the express desire to not advertise for anyone, and although some of my clothing purchases as an adult have been more than strictly utilitarian, I don't think that they have ever been made so I can appear to be representing something in particular.
   It's perhaps more than just a little contradictory that a person with as many tattoos as I have should want to be sort of unnoticed, but that's how I feel.
   When I was three or four years old (some time before my interest in the Plymouth Duster), my family lived in Paris for a short time, and my mother has told me that I loved the french Citreon 2CV, or "deux cheveux". The car was inexpensive, made originally to encourage farmers to use motorized forms of transportation, and generally regarded as "ugly" by many at the time (many still think that it is). It seems that my aesthetic can be traced back that far.
   Thinking again about my own car, I have always enjoyed the fact that it is an economy model, assuming perhaps that it illustrates the beliefs I hold about my relationship to the objects in my life. Perhaps in that way, my car states something about me as clearly as the person who views theirs as a symbol of status.